To Anna Quinn (2)

Over the kind brown earth we bend
And one with god are we
It is the October time - the end
Of passions jittery

The white bleached stalks
Are like the bones
Of long dead lovers
The lean-faced rocks
Unveiled in winds
Are Eternities dictators.

That song will not come
That child must be still-born
I shall lie dumb
A season fallow.

The Circle is the Father
Diameter His Son
Spirit the mathematical centre
Thus truth is known
In all turning wheels
In all tumbling clowns
As in the firmament deeps
Where the Prophet drowns.

There is nothing to be said
When we are denied
The sense-bread.
Once a poet cried:
   "I hunger"
And his song died.

Yesterday I saw the Earth beautiful
Through the frosted glass of November's tree
I peered into an April country
Where love was day-dream free

And in the steam rising from the dungheap
Another firmament was blown
Dotted over with fairy worlds
And lamped with silver stone.

My fathers strung for me
No geneologic rosary
Beads of hypnotic power - 
I am, as Napoleon said, my own ancestors.

I am the representative of those
Clay-faced sucklers of spade-handles
Mute peasants for whom Apollo blows
Aesthetic winds in nine-day-laboured scandals.

Once the Golden Book was open to me
And I read
The Answer to the Riddle
And I, an unschooled rustic
Was wise
As fool's laughter in an academy.

I saw Christ to-day
At a street corner stand, 
In the rags of a beggar he stood
He held ballads in his hand.

I know the misery of towns
The hunger and the drouth,
Wise men on pavements built for clowns,
And poor forgotten Truth

A turnip-sculptor kneeling where
The heels of fashion fly - 
A ha'penny for a poet's prayer
In the glare of the Savoy.