Your course in the cot to my bed, with the speed of ice,
The giant mirror, the trumpet ringed with a bell,
Till naked you stand, gold-fleeced, shaping, a shell,
All seas to your color, Llewelyn, child above price.
Peter Viereck
CHILDHOOD
You cannot bear this silent, heavenly sadness.
You need voluptuous, need tellurian sighs.
Not up but down, down, earthward is your sky,
Your own (but how to make you know? ) by birth.
There shines the park that offers you more lilacs
Than all the arms of longing can enfold.
And so you grow, you grope for parks while drifting
All the while southward all unknowingly.
Then groves more south, more slow than lukewarm breezes
(More south, more velvet) sing you dissonances
(More dense, more south ) that cloy unbearably,
Till every vibrant, swaying twig bends down
Heavy with figs and with the grapes of breasts.
Such exhalation, then, of tenderness-
Of fondling tides on crumbling promontories,
Of shade of clouds on white young birch-bark, fleeting
As
patterns hinted on the wildest grasses
By rims of bicycles in picnic weather-
Slakes you to sleepiness. You snuff the sun out;
You unroll far beaches to your chin like quilts.
You become a
Maerchen
dreamed by the deep, cool clams,
And by the huddling bats of timeless caves.
Eight hundred years of this. And then a signal.
You'll know, you'll never doubt it, you'll arise;
And, yawning, stretch into a constellation;
And fill the sky that has been waiting for you.
