THE CHILD

All night they have been wounded on each other,
the waves that fall like armour from their poise
of leopard or of slingsman, and the trees
alive with arrogance and rage of weather.
We listen: not to ask what anguish drives
the wind through monstrous dark, what marriage	brings
tumult and labour and the war of things:
these were the place and symbol of our loves.

There is no loneliness like birth: perhaps,
being aloof in pain, tonight is birth.
But not for you, whose world is kind, and sleeps.

When you have heard the meaning of the wind,
what will the symbol or the place be worth?
The world in which we made you is not kind.