Poems & poèmes/The Weeping Venus

by Natalie Clifford Barney

 

THE WEEPING VENUS

by Romaine

Laid out as dead in moonlight shroud
Beneath a derelict of cloud:
A double wreckage safe from flight,
High-caged as grief, in prisoned night.—
Unseeing eyes whose clustering tears
Tell the pure crystal of her years.—
No crown of thorns, no wounded side,
Yet as the God-man crucified,
Her body expiates the sin
That love and life with her begin!