Poems (Hardy)/The mountain lioness
THE MOUNTAIN LIONESS
I
I HAD remembered it, the crunch of bones, Almost too vividly to merely look And let them pass, the woman with a book,And that fair child with plaything conesAnd bits of pebbles, while across the stones Of my own spring he tripped and shook 'The very brake where I lay hid, and tookA rose as one takes lightly what he owns.I had remembered it, and hunger lean, Low crouching 'neath the brier, into his faceBreathed hotly through the tangled, fern-thick screen; So close I breathed, so fierce, as to displaceHis yellow curls, as though a wind blew by;No other harm! This beast-pent soul knows why.
II
I was a woman once, a mother,—God, That I remember it! that I still know! I had a child like that; and 't was my woeThat, being beautiful, I therefore trodThe hearts of men as leaves upon the sod, And tasked my soul its uttermost to show That men the love of angels would foregoEven for my meanest smile, my faintest nod.I let him die with him that loved us both; Then men despised me, and I died to this:A soulless beast, whose yellow whelps were loth To own her, so died too. Oh, even to missEven then might make me loathe myself so deep,My soul, long dead, would come to life and weep!