George Barker

Here you will find thePoemO Who Will Speak From a Womb or a Cloud?of poet George Barker

O Who Will Speak From a Womb or a Cloud?

而不是更少光金色和绿色躺在the cyclonic curl and diamonded eye, than Love lay yesterday on the breast like a beast. Not less light shall God tread my maze of nerve Than that great dread of tomorrow drove over My maze of days. Not less terrible that tread Stomping upon your grave than I shall tread there. Who is a god to haunt the tomb but Love? Therefore I shall be there at morning and midnight, Not with a straw in my hair and a tear as Ophelia Floating along my sorrow, but I shall come with The cabala of things, the cipher of nature, so that With the mere flounce of a bird's feather crest I shall speak to you where you sit in all trees, Where you conspire with all things that are dead. Who is so far that Love cannot speak to him? So that no corner can hide you, no autumn of leaves So deeply close over you that I shall not find you, To stretch down my hand and sting you with life Like poison that resurrects. O remember How once the Lyrae dazzled and how the Novembers Smoked, so that blood burned, flashed its mica, And that was life. Now if I dip my hand in your grave Shall I find it bloody with autumn and bright with stars? Who is to answer if you will not answer me? But you are the not yet dead, so cannot answer. Hung by a hair's breadth to the breath of a lung, Nothing you know of the hole over which you hang But that it's dark and deep as tomorrow midnight. I ask, but you cannot answer except with words Which show me the mere interior of your fear, The reverse face of the world. But this, This is not death, the standing on the head So that a sky is seen. O who Who but the not yet born can tell me of my bourne? Lie you there, lie you there, my never, never, Never to be delivered daughter, so wise in ways Where you perch like a bird beyond the horizon, Seeing but not being seen, above our being? Then tell me, shall the meeting ever be, When the corpse dives back through the womb To clasp his child before it ever was? Who but the dead can kiss the not yet born? Sad is space between a start and a finish, Like the rough roads of stars, fiery and mad. I go between birth and the urn, a bright ash Soon blazed to blank, like a fire-ball. But Nothing I bring from the before, no message, No clue, no key, no answer. I hear no echo, Only the sheep's blood dripping from the gun, The serpent's tear like fire along the branch. O who will speak from a womb or a cloud?