Spring comes down like an airstrike
To the white unready earth
And fells the frozen powers
All in a single evening.
Makes the sleeping fields to shine
Brimming bright with their delight
Makes their joy to overflow
And sets the ditches singing.
Tonight the world is trembling
As that laughter is released
To shake from their foundations
All the little works of men.
And tonight I wonder
If this is how it will end
In ever-swifter swingings
Of its sorrows into joys.
His love’s a blade this time of year.
Bright as the vernal equinox
Cold as the rain that ends the snow
Hard as the howling Lenten wind.
He made that blade to break my heart
To cut a furrow deep and straight
Beneath the salt and cigarettes
Into the darkness where I sleep.
To find and lay beneath the sun
All that which I have hidden there
All the buried coins and corpses
Secrets scattered to the seagulls.
Here his love comes, belching diesel
To till the fields of no-man’s-land
Pouring into my ripped-up heart
Seeds by the hundred million.
All our roads go wrong;
All our highways ever bending
All our shortcuts never ending
All our roads go wrong.
All we make, we mar;
All our weaving ever rending
With disaster ever trending
All we make, we mar.
All our towers fall;
All our heights ever descending
Our facades so well pretending
All our towers fall.
But there is one who
Takes the bent and keeps on bending
Takes the rent and keeps on rending
Dies with us and keeps descending
Till we reach our never-ending.
I sat with her today
In that last awful place
Counting the bones between
The lines upon her face.
Now I don’t know what happens
To the bread or to the wine
But You were with her today
And with her You were dying.
underthehebrewsea 