The Lion and the Rose Read Online Free PDF Page B

many yield up their true power
    Out of weakness, the moment of passion
    Betrayed by years of confused living—
    For it is surely a lifetime work,
    This learning to be a woman.
    Until at the end what is clear
    Is the marvelous skill to make
    Life grow in all its forms,
    Is knowing where to ask, where to yield,
    Where to sow, where to plough the field,
    Where to kill the heart or let it live;
    To be Eve, the giver of knowledge, the lover;
    To be Mary, the shield, the healer and the mother.
    The balance is eternal whatever we may wish;
    The law can be broken but we cannot change
    What is supremely beautiful and strange.
    Where find the root? Where re-join the source?
    The fertile feminine goddess, double river?
    IV
    We think of all the women hunting for themselves,
    Turning and turning to each other with a driving
    Need to learn to understand, to live in charity,
    And above all to be used fully, to be giving
    From wholeness, wholeness back to love’s deep clarity.
    O, all the burning hearts of women unappeased
    Shine like great stars, like flowers of fire,
    As the sun goes and darkness opens all desire—
    And we are with a fierce compassion seized.
    How lost, how far from home, how parted from
    The earth, my sisters, O my sisters, we have come.
    For so long asked so little of ourselves and men,
    And let the Furies have their way—our treasure,
    The single antidote to all our world’s confusion,
    A few gifts to the poor small god of pleasure.
    The god of passion has gone back into the mountain,
    Is sleeping in the dark, deep in the earth.
    We have betrayed a million times the holy fountain,
    The potent spirit who brings his life to birth,
    The masculine and violent joy of pure creation—
    And yielded up the sacred fires to sensation.
    But we shall never come home to the earth
    Until we bring the great god and his mirth
    Back from the mountain, until we let this stranger
    Plough deep into our hearts his joy and anger,
    And we shall never find ourselves again
    Until we ask men’s greatness back from men,
    Until we make the fertile god our own,
    And giving up our lives, receive his own.

LOVE POEMS

THE LADY AND THE UNICORN
    The Cluny Tapestries
    I am the unicorn and bow my head
    You are the lady woven into history
    And here forever we are bound in mystery
    Our wine, Imagination, and our bread,
    And I the unicorn who bows his head.
    You are all interwoven in my history
    And you and I have been most strangely wed
    I am the unicorn and bow my head
    And lay my wildness down upon your knee
    You are the lady woven into history.
    And here forever we are sweetly wed
    With flowers and rabbits in the tapestry
    You are the lady woven into history
    Imagination is our bridal bed:
    We lie ghostly upon it, no word said.
    Among the flowers of the tapestry
    I am the unicorn and by your bed
    Come gently, gently to bow down my head,
    Lay at your side this love, this mystery,
    And call you lady of my tapestry.
    I am the unicorn and bow my head
    To one so sweetly lost, so strangely wed:
    You sit forever under a small formal tree
    Where I forever search your eyes to be
    Rewarded with this shining of our tragedy
    And know your beauty was not cast for me,
    Know we are woven all in mystery,
    The wound imagined where no one has bled,
    My wild love chastened to this history
    Where I before your eyes, bow down my head.

SPRING SONG
    When I came here in the evening
    Long long ago
    The apple blossoms foamed
    Under my window,
    Stiff coral branches, rich and still,
    So still and fair,
    It seemed a holy presence floated
    On green air.
    And that night peace was with me
    For I did not know
    That I would wake to find those riches melted
    All like snow,
    All gone, and the whole orchard green
    Instead of white,
    My love, my love, the fruit already knotted
    After a single night.

THE HARVEST
    Earth opens to the eyes
    As though never seen,
    All new, all fresh surprise
    Greener than green
    Where crystal streams are flowing
    Through velvet banks,
    Grass under water