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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SHARDS, by                    
First Line: I walk among you, women,
Last Line: In walking among you.
Subject(s): Men; Women


I walk among you, women,
And learn an eternal tragic harmony of shards.

Tall stone buildings and cataracts of headlong steel
Have come out of you, women,
To make the rushing troubled cities.
And forests of great sad trees have been cut down
Because your lips pressed so,
And there was a fire in the center of your bodies.

Strong men, suddenly made rough,
Have drawn giant black cannons through viscous mud,
And ridden a million horses to death,
And lustfully trampled smiles,
Because of a strange silent golden crying out of your bodies, women.

And I walk among you
Learning an eternal tragic harmony of shards.

Blind, you give the world creation, women;
And a thousand agonies, like thin steel knives,
Go out of your eyes,
Because your soil is not plowed deep enough.
Men, seeing these agonies, will build and sweat
Like heavy horses in a field on a hot day.
You have always a pale moon-sorrow, women,
Though they may sweat their lives away.

I have spoken, myself, to your bodies, women;
And I have perceived there sometimes a beauty,
Remote, like a throbbing infinity of clear small stars,
Milk-white, caressed by blueness.
I have joyed in you, women --
In the perception of this beauty

That was like the strains of an imagined song,
Making my body lift itself
Toward thin tops of lonely winter trees;
A song of slowly poignant music, long forgotten.
And a hungry sadness has eaten away your cheeks, women,
Often after I have left you.

I have perceived an eternal tragic harmony of shards,
In walking among you.





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