Sicilian Cyclamens

When he pushed his bush of black hair off his brow:

When she lifted her mop from her eyes, and screwed it

            in a knob behind

            —O act of fearful temerity!

When they felt their foreheads bare, naked to heaven,

            their eyes revealed:

When they left the light of heaven brandished like a knife at

            their defenceless eyes

And the sea like a blade at their face,

Mediterranean savages:

When they came out, face-revealed, under heaven, from

            the shaggy undergrowth of their own hair

For the first time,

They saw tiny rose cyclamens between their toes, growing

Where the slow toads sat brooding on the past.

 

Slow toads, and cyclamen leaves

Stickily glistening with eternal shadow

Keeping to earth.

Cyclamen leaves

Toad-filmy, earth-iridescent

Beautiful

Frost-filigreed

Spumed with mud

Snail-nacreous

Low down.

 

The shaking aspect of the sea

And man’s defenceless bare face

And cyclamens putting their ears back.

 

Long, pensive, slim-muzzled greyhound buds

Dreamy, not yet present,

Drawn out of earth

At his toes.

 

Dawn-rose

Sub-delighted, stone engendered

Cyclamens, young cyclamens

Arching

Waking, pricking their ears

Like delicate very-young greyhound bitches

Half-yawning at the open, inexperienced

Vistas of day,

Folding back their soundless petalled ears.

 

Greyhound bitches

Bending their rosy muzzles pensive down,

And breathing soft, unwilling to wake to the new day

Yet sub-delighted.

 

Ah Mediterranean morning, when our world began!

Far-off Mediterranean mornings,

Pelasgic faces uncovered

And unbudding cyclamens.

 

The hare suddenly goes uphill

Laying back her long ears with unwinking bliss.

 

And up the pallid, sea-blenched Mediterranean stone-slopes

Rose cyclamen, ecstatic fore-runner!

Cyclamens, ruddy-muzzled cyclamens

In little bunches like bunches of wild hares

Muzzles together, ears-aprick

 

Whispering witchcraft

Like women at a well, the dawn-fountain.

 

Greece, and the world’s morning

While all the Parthenon marbles still fostered the roots of the cyclamen.

Violets

Pagan, rosy-muzzled violets

Autumnal

Dawn-pink,

Dawn-pale

Among squat toad-leaves sprinkling the unborn

Erechtheion marbles.

 

                                                                                                     Taormina