Never, bolshevistically
To be able to stand for all these!
Alas, alas, I have got to leave it all
To the youths in Sunday suits and yellow shoes
Who have pulled down the salvia flowers
And rosy delicate hibiscus flowers
And everything else to their disgusting level,
Never, of course, to put anything up again.
But yet
If they pull all the world down,
The process will amount to the same in the end.
Instead of flame and flame-clean ash
Slow watery rotting back to level muck
And final humus,
Whence the re-start.
And still I cannot bear it
That they take hibiscus and the salvia flower.
Taormina.
THE EVANGELISTIC BEASTS
ST MATTHEW
They are not all beasts.
One is a man, for example, and one is a bird.
I, Matthew, am a man.
“And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me”—