"CHOOSING EVOCATIVE WORDS, WE LIFT OUR HANDS..."

Choosing evocative words, we lift our hands
towards the five ambitions of men;
and in our night the fireworks gush tomorrows
bringing no fear,
but each a penny Jupiter.
Fingers, creators of our world, knowers
of the heart's lustful cipher, the soul's
script; who feel strange roads through music, furrow
the springing sea:
have you no power to hear, to pray?

You have given us the limpid lovelady
in towers of sunlight, in wooden fields
before a shout of hands; her lacquered eyes
and the blind breath
that haunts the actor: is there no path
where speaking dolls, where fears that come alive,
mock us but cannot reach to us?
Tomorrows are all earth; it is the past
that's terrible.
We had made plans for burial.

In green half-living houses of the dead,
with voices of sack-cloth and glass,
creatures await the mouldering beauty of
the angelus.
Here also resurrection is;
but five ambitions and the art of hands
made crosses and huge wombs of lead:
this was to happen in the dead of winter;
one more season,
there would have been no gate to that prison.

But what we buried was a thing living.
Fingers, creators of our world,
why could you not lay hold of life, as of
invented things?
Choosing evocative words, we hang
our hearts upon the five ambitions of men;
but clasp out knees in Babylon:
oh penta-Danaë, free spirits march
beneath your tower:
the graven mansions' terrible choir.