Versione Italiana | Nota biografica | Versione lettura |
Three dark buds for the Trinity
On one twig I found in the lining of my coat
Forgotten since I broke them from the tree
That grows opposite the RSA building
At the top of Vulcan Lane , there I would lay down my parka
On the grass and meditate, cross-legged ; there was a girl
Who sat beside me there;
She would hold a blue flower at the centre of bullring
While the twigs on the tree became black
And then slowly green again – she was young – if I had said,
“Have my coat; have my money”
She would have gone away; but because I gave her nothing
She came again and again to share that nothing
Like a bird that nests in the open hand.
In this scarred country, this cold threshold land,
The mountains crouch like tigers. By the sea
Folk talk of them hid vaguely out of sight.
But here they stand in massed solidity
To seize upon the day and night horizon.
Men shut within a whelming bowl of hills
Grow strange, say little when they leave their high
Yet buried homesteads. Return there silently
When thunder of night-rivers fills the sky
And giant wings brood over loftily and near.
The mountains crouch like tigers. Or they wait
As women wait. The mountains have no age.
But O the heart leaps to behold them loom !
A sense as of vast fate rings in the blood. No refuge,
No refuge is there from the flame that reaches
Among familiar things and makes them seem
Trivial, vain. O spirit walks on the peaks !
Eye glances across a gorge to further crags.
There is no desire. But the stream, but the avalanche speaks,
And their word is louder than freedom, the mountain embrace
Were a death dearer than freedom or freedom’s flags.
I will go to the coastline and mingle with men.
These mountain buttresses build beyond the horizon.
They call. But he whom they lay their spell upon
Leaves home, leaves kindred. The range of the telescope’s eye
Is well, if the brain follows not to the outermost fields of vision.
I shall drown myself in humanity. Better to lie
Dumb in the city than under the mountainous wavering sky.
The mountains crouch like tigers.
They are but stone yet the seeking eyes grow blind.
It is not women only
Who lose themselves in the wound of love
When Attis ruled by Cybele
Tore out his sex with a flint knife,
He became a girl. Blood fell
In flecks on the black forest soil
So it was for me, Pyrrha,
And the wound will ache, aches now,
Though I hear the flutte-players
And the rattling drum. To live in
Exile from the earth I came from,
Pub, bed, table, a fire of hot bluegum,
The boys in the bathing shed playing cards
It’s hard to live on Mount Ida
Where frost bites the flesh
And the sun stabs at the roots of trees,
No longer a man – Ah! Don’t let
Your lion growl and run against me,
Cybele’s daughter – I accept
Hard bondage, harder song !