Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry
Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
And there this night I walk in the white giant's thigh
Where barren as boulders women lie longing still
To labour and love though they lay down long ago.
Through throats where many rivers meet, the women pray,
Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow
Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained
Away
And alone in the night's eternal, curving act
They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived
And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked
Hill. Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved
In the courters' lanes, or twined in the ox roasting
Sun
In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay
Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with any one
Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay
Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade
Petticoats galed high, or shy with the rough riding
Boys,
Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade,
Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of
Joys.
Time by, their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly,
Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush
Light of his thighs, spreadeagle to the dunghill sky,
Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun's bush
Rough as cows' tongues and trashed with brambles their
Buttermilk
Manes, under his quenchless summer barbed gold to the
Bone,
Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk
And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail
Stone.
Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed
House
And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming
Frost,
The scurrying, furred small friars squeal, in the dowse
Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl
Crossed
Their breast, the vaulting does roister, the horned
Bucks climb
Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes
Foams,
All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and
Chime
And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,
Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,
Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king
Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead
And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in
The spring,
And their firefly hairpins flew, and the ricks ran
Round —
(But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives
Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose's ground
They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives) —
Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their
Dust.
The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro
Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust
As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low
And cut the birds' boughs that the minstrel sap ran
Red.
They from houses where the harvest bows, hold me hard,
Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the
Dead
And the rain wring out it's tongues on the faded yard,
Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall
Leaved
Grave, after Beloved on the grass gulfed cross is
Scrubbed
Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved
Save by their long desirers in the fox cubbed
Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood: to these
Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill
Love for ever meridian through the courters' trees
And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires
Still.
