Taking this clod of rosy clay in my hand
I see rivers crawling with trilobite
Gripping the water’s bed.
And, blackening off near the end,
Their tails whipped the rock
And chased up leagues of atomic silt
That hung, waiting for its time,
Stirring with cloudy intelligence
Pinching these pointed pebbles of fragmentary cliffs
I see a mind calculating monsters
From our small edgewise dreams.
And even in their long element
The torn and ragged roots
Of our poor imaginations
Falter like wingless particles
Caught in the rude gusts of God
Plucking the small suspended tendril
I trace its ancestry of earth-breakers
With a single sweep of the stem.
From every cell broken by the brute ground
This natural air goes up,
Riding the whispering words of God,
To other fields
Where life despoils its seed.
Prising out the tuft of this quivering fur
I save the memory of blood
That tangles in the throat of this dust;
The sap of calves
Who trod down mountains
And raised this bursting fallow mould
For next season’s joys
And the land’s eternal rest.
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