Genesis

I

Against the burly air I strode

Crying the miracles of God.

And first I brought the sea to bear

Upon the dead weight of the land;

And the waves flourished at my prayer,

The rivers spawned their sand.

And where the streams were salt and full

The tough pig-headed salmon strove,

Ramming the ebb, in the tide’s pull,

To reach the steady hills above.

II

The second day I stood and saw

The osprey plunge with triggered claw,

Feathering blood along the shore,

To lay the living sinew bare.

And the third day I cried: “Beware

The soft-voiced owl, the ferret’s smile,

The hawk’s deliberate stoop in air,

Cold eyes, and bodies hooped in steel,

Forever bent upon the kill.”

III

And I renounced, on the fourth day,

This fierce and unregenerate clay.

Building as a huge myth for man

The watery Leviathan.

And made the long-winged albatross

Scour the ashes of the sea

Where Capricorn and Zero cross,

A brooding immortality –

Such as the charmed phoenix has

In the unwinthering tree.

IV

The phoenix burns as cold as frost;

And, like a legendary ghost,

The phantom-bird goes wild and lost,

Upon a pointless ocean tossed.

So, the fifth day, I turned again

To flesh and blood, and the blood’s pain.

VI

On the sixth day, as I rode

In haste about the works of God,

With spurs I plucked the horse’s blood.

By blood we live, the hot, the cold,

To ravage and redeem the world:

There is no bloodless myth will hold.

And by Christ’s blood are men made free

Though in close shrouds their bodies lie

Under the rough pelt of the sea;

Tough Earth has rolled beneath her weight

The bones that cannot bear the light.

Genesis