For the Marriage in Cana of Galilee
Dark-eyed,
O woman of my dreams,
Ivory sandalled,
There is none like thee among the dancers,
None with swift feet.
I have not found thee in the tents,
In the broken darkness.
I have not found thee at the well-head
Among the women with pitchers.
Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark;
Thy face as a river with lights.
White as an almond are thy shoulders;
As new almonds stripped from the husk.
They guard thee not with eunuchs;
Not with bars of copper.
Gilt turquoise and silver are in the place of thy rest.
A brown robe, with threads of gold woven in
patterns, hast thou gathered about thee,
O Nathat-Ikanaie, ‘Tree-at-the-river’.
As a rillet among the sedge are thy hands upon me;
Thy fingers a frosted stream.
Thy maidens are white like pebbles;
Their music about thee!
There is none like thee among the dancers;
None with swift feet.
***
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) is one of the most influential but also difficult poets of the 20th century. He was the man of exceptional intellectual brilliance, erudition and courage. An American patriot, unhappy about the takeover of the United States by Jewish political and financial interests, the takeover that he anticipated, and which is by now all but complete, a true friend of Europe, an enlightened lover of shared cultural heritage, artistic revolutionary, participant of many important literary movements.