The Donkey · The Beatific Vision · The Hope of the Streets

The Donkey

When fishes flew and forests walked
  And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
  Then surely I was born;

With monstrous head and sickening cry
  And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
  On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
  Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
  I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
  One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
  And palms before my feet.

The Beatific Vision

Through what fierce incarnations, furled
  In fire and darkness, did I go,
Ere I was worthy in the world
  To see a dandelion grow?

Well, if in any woes or wars
  I bought my naked right to be,
Grew worthy of the grass, nor gave
  The wren, my brother, shame for me.

But what shall God not ask of him
  In the last time when all is told,
Who saw her stand beside the hearth,
  The firelight garbing her in gold?

The Hope of the Streets

The still sweet meadows shimmered: and I stood
  And cursed them, bloom of hedge and bird of tree,
And bright and high beyond the hunch-backed wood
  The thunder and the splendour of the sea.

Give back the Babylon where I was born,
  The lips that gape give back, the hands that grope,
And noise and blood and suffocating scorn
  An eddy of fierce faces—and a hope

That 'mid those myriad heads one head find place,
  With brown hair curled like breakers of the sea,
And two eyes set so strangely in the face
  That all things else are nothing suddenly.