Amaze

'There it is!–
You play beside a death-bed like a child,
Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place
To teach the living. None of all these things,
Can women understand. You generalise,
Oh, nothing!–not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts,
So sympathetic to the personal pang,

I saw the garden where my aunt had died
And her two children and a woman from next door;
It was like a burst pod filled with clay.

A mile away in the night I had heard the bombs
Sing and then burst themselves between cramped houses
With bright soft flashes and sounds like banging doors;

The last of them crushed the four bodies into the ground,
Scattered the shelter, and blasted my uncle’s corpse

Here, in the darkness, where this plaster saint
Stands nearer than God stands to our distress,
And one small candle shines, but not so faint
As the far lights of everlastingness,
I’d rather kneel than over there, in open day
Where Christ is hanging, rather pray
To something more like my own clay,
Not too divine;

I
“There is a Thorn—it looks so old,
In truth, you’d find it hard to say
How it could ever have been young,
It looks so old and grey.
Not higher than a two years' child
It stands erect, this aged Thorn;
No leaves it has, no prickly points;
It is a mass of knotted joints,
A wretched thing forlorn.
It stands erect, and like a stone
With lichens is it overgrown.

II
“Like rock or stone, it is o’ergrown,

I have to thank God I'm a woman,
For in these ordered days a woman only
Is free to be very hungry, very lonely.

It is sad for Feminism, but still clear
That man, more often than woman, is pioneer.
If I would confide a new thought,
First to a man must it be brought.

Now, for our sins, it is my bitter fate

Deflores. What makes your lip so strange? This must not be betwixt us.
Beatrice. The man talks wildly.
Deflores. Come kisse me with a zeal now.
Beatrice. Heaven I doubt him.
Deflores. I will not stand so long to beg 'em shortly.
Beatrice. Take heed Deflores of forgetfulness, 'twill soon betray us.
Deflores. Take you heed first;
Faith y'are grown much forgetfull, y'are to blame in't.
Beatrice. He's bold, and I am blam'd for't.
Deflores. I have eas'd you of your trouble, think on't, I'me in pain,
And must be as'd of ou; 'tis a charity,
Justice invites your blood to understand me.
Beatrice. I dare not.
Deflores. Quickly.
Beatrice. Oh I never shall, speak if yet further of that I may lose

We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

I walk’d the other day, to spend my hour,
Into a field,
Where I sometimes had seen the soil to yield
A gallant flow’r;
But winter now had ruffled all the bow’r
And curious store
I knew there heretofore.

Yet I, whose search lov’d not to peep and peer
I’ th’ face of things,
Thought with my self, there might be other springs
Besides this here,
Which, like cold friends, sees us but once a year;
And so the flow’r
Might have some other bow’r.

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine