The Earth Turns South/Love-Givers

by Clement Richardson Wood

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 Nile
Lent 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 toll
That 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 minted
As lover, and mother of days to be!