On a day when the breath of roses
Plumpened a swooning breeze
And all the silken combes of summer
Opened wide their knees,
Between two sighs they planted one –
A willed one, a wanted one –
And he will be the sign, they said, of our felicities.
Eager the loins he sprang from,
Happy the sheltering heart:
Seldom had the seed of man
So charmed, so clear a start.
And he was born as frail a one,
As ailing, freakish, pale a one
As ever the wry planets knotted their beams to thwart.
Sun locked up for winter;
Earth an empty rind:
Two strangers harshly flung together
As by a flail of wind.
Oh was it not a furtive thing,
A loveless, damned, abortive thing –
This flurry of the groaning dust, and what it left behind!
Sure, from such warped beginnings
Nothing debonair
Can come? But neither shame nor panic,
Drugs nor sharp despair
Could uproot that untoward thing,
That all too fierce and froward thing:
Willy-nilly born it was, divinely formed and fair.