PRESENCE OF MAN
Sometimes he seemed like that one: the man of power
Who with the reins of a charioteer would ride
Racers of Constantinople on wide, resonant courses
And leap in an electric equipoise
From the unsteady back to back of galloping horses.
Sometimes he seemed like that one: the hunter
Who was mantled in a mist that morning breathes.
A posse shape of stooped, halated shadow,
Over a mountain marsh where ducks fly low,
Brought down the tinted duck to the frigid ripple.
Sometimes he seemed like that one: the father,
The carer at the grey hour when day itself is pale
Over the sheep without shape that drift the world,
Clouds beyond the tenement. How quiet on his crook
He wishes that the rider and the hunter were not whirled.
Lysander Kemp
GREAT GREEN
The dark woman in the Ecuadorian gloom
has beauty not to our liking, too difficult,
neither voluptuous nor like a flower,
but monumental: the wide primitive hips,
the massive steadfast accepting body not marble
nor ivory but rock-brown, color of earth.
She lacks, her staunch and obscure torso lacks
Parisian charms and Phidian perfections–
but say Rivera smoothens her power, or say
Gauguin flattened her statuary strength
to planes of color; or she is monolithic,
a Mayan stela grand in the deeps of green.
