Thrill with lissome lust of the light,
O man ! My man !
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan ! Io Pan .
Io Pan ! Io Pan ! Come over the sea
From Sicily and from Arcady !
Roaming as Bacchus, with fauns and pards
And nymphs and styrs for thy guards,
On a milk-white ass, come over the sea
To me, to me,
......
Man, the egregious egoist
(In mystery the twig is bent)
Imagines, by some mental twist,
That he alone is sentient
Of the intolerable load
That on all living creatures lies,
Nor stoops to pity in the toad
The speechless sorrow of his eyes.
......
Caves, here, contain dead / live
snakes, some keys, for instance,
have holes or,
the transgressive guardian, mind
with wings beneath.
She felt the urge to send musk-confects,
Across the Straits of Gibraltar
Interior, private floods, neshamah (Jewish soul),
......
FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face
to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious
you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning
home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to
me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
......
I
AWAKE! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.
II
Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,
"Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
......
These are poems about Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the Serpent aka Lucifer aka Satan aka Mephistopheles, Cain and Abel, the forbidden fruit, "original sin," the Fall and its bitter aftermath...
Primordial Eden
by Michael R. Burch
Then earth was heaven too, a perfect garden.
Apples burgeoned and shone—unplucked on sagging boughs.
What, then, would the children eat?
......
An errant boy came knocking at my door
I was swayed, daunted by a serpent
Relentlessly which wandered by the moor
Or upon my floor many a days spent.
It, as seen transiently was like snake, big
And I shivered daily, loitered here and there.
As it might have come with all it's league
I sought someone and could not bear.
......
in blooms grass and trees
lazy like these summer days
snake snakes the hours by
It will not hurt me when I am old,
A running tide where moonlight burned
Will not sting me like silver snakes;
The years will make me sad and cold,
It is the happy heart that breaks.
The heart asks more than life can give,
When that is learned, then all is learned;
The waves break fold on jewelled fold,
But beauty itself is fugitive,
......
To my friend George Fleming author of 'The Nile Novel' and
'Mirage')
I.
A year ago I breathed the Italian air, -
And yet, methinks this northern Spring is fair,-
These fields made golden with the flower of March,
The throstle singing on the feathered larch,
The cawing rooks, the wood-doves fluttering by,
The little clouds that race across the sky;
And fair the violet's gentle drooping head,
......