The Earth Turns South/Love-Givers
LOVE-GIVERS
I.You are remembered, women once loved well:O brown-eyed girl of Florence,You looked when Dante Alighieri passed. . . .He paid for this with a life's adoration,Crowning you over the daughters of heaven.
There was Helen, who fled from her Spartan husband,Sick of the endless clatter of wars;Fled with a dazzled youth, over the tousled sea,—As the oar-blades flashed to the moon, and sliced the waters,—And gave her body to him. . . .He rendered the last bruised drop of his blood,And a towered city burned and ended.
And that warm dusky queer of the NileLent of her practiced body to a Roman,Who paid the world for her. . . .Women who were loved, you are well remembered.
II.And what of you, in your slim shining beauty,Dawn-lipped, eyed like the gray-blue sky of March, Who have given me the body's tollThat Helen and Cleopatra paid,And more?Who have yielded a field for a blossoming human harvest,Have walked, clear-eyed,Into the torture room of pain,That our love might come to its fruitage?
I have no Troy to dower you with,No world, stained with a Roman peace.I have only myself—Little enough for the debt I owe you,—You, whose beauty is mintedAs lover, and mother of days to be!