The youth of birds...

I sing the youth of birds, white wings
Plunging through the forest,
While the stream pipes silver
And exhales billowing rapids, that,
Like the carnival of clouds
Piercing the white sky
Invokes the springing rye,
Whose tender stubble loves
The wild edge, and dreams
Of the chaotic hedge, a startled growth
That reaches for exploding stars.

I sing the dark moon, who floats
Over the jewel of the night like a precious
Vessel, and accosts in her private dismay,
The battles of nacreous stars, whose honey
Sweetens the eyes of a fragile beauty,
Ready to break in the dawn's hot rays.

Luxuries of Albion, your hot lips,
Your strangling glances, have sea-shattered
Many a sailor wrecked on siren eyes,
Whose call like the guttering forests,
Thin pupils of thunder-struck rage,
Kept the wild song within the rounds
And wreathed the rocks
In a torture for brilliant young men
Who deserved to die.

I will not mourn them, though I am a singer of Albion,
And though Albion's first fruit have I gathered
In a spilling copia of honey-sweet milk,
Teat-nourished and willing, ready to spring
Like the flowers of twilight,
And if the sunlight could spill down my hair
In golden strings, spear-sharp, and I
Were mantled of moon-glowing silver, these acrid cascades
Would nonetheless fall from a harp unwilling
To follow pleasure's lead.

You people who live by the way-side, on the road
Where the east first trenches an occident of spas,
You have a charcoal street and black chimneys, soot-stained,
And you are soiled, and the flame in your pupils is red.
I have seen nothing of nobility in your lotus-cheeked boys
And your girls are as scarlet as roses. You pursue the pretty shadows
Of a setting sun, you run to sweep away a patch of darkness
Like a spot of dirt -- with tea-tinged teeth you yawn and clap
The air. The holy among you profess no faith
That's worthy of your name, the infidels I credit only
For their breaches tumbling down
And rolling into roses: this blooming vegetation
Deserves your veneration. As to saints, I knew of one
Who executed swiftly (twinkling like a distant star)
His martyrdom by bursting in a car.

***

The youth of birds, white wings
Plunging through the forest,
While the stream pipes silver
And exhales billowing rapids, that,
Like the carnival of clouds
Piercing the white sky
Invokes the springing rye,
Whose tender stubble loves
The wild edge, and dreams
Of the chaotic hedge, a startled growth
That reaches for exploding stars.