For authorities whose hopes
are shaped by mercenaries?
Writers entrapped by
teatime fame and by
commuters’ comforts? Not for these
the paper nautilus
constructs her thin glass shell.
Giving her perishable
souvenir of hope, a dull
white outside and smooth-
edged inner surface
glossy as the sea, the watchful
maker of it guards it
day and night; she scarcely
eats until the eggs are hatched.
Buried eight-fold in her eight
arms, for she is in
a sense a devil-
fish, her glass ram’shorn-cradled freight
is hid but is not crushed;
as Hercules, bitten
by a crab loyal to the hydra,
was hindered to succeed,
the intensively
watched eggs coming from
the shell free it when they are freed,–
leaving its wasp-nest flaws
of white on white, and close-
laid Ionic chiton-folds
like the lines in the mane of
a Parthenon horse,
round which the arms had
wound themselves as if they knew love
is the only fortress
strong enough to trust to.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Let me be to Thee as the circling bird poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Огюст Барбье – Известность
- Robert Burns: Address To A Haggis:
- Эмиль Верхарн – Восстание
- Have Lost You
- The Princess: A Medley: Home they Brought her Warrior Dead poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Василий Жуковский – Суд Божий над епископом
- Николай Языков – Странный случай
- Dust by Rupert Brooke
- A Jog-Trot Pair by Thomas Hardy
- Sonnet 109: O, never say that I was false of heart by William Shakespeare
- The Dirge of Wallace by Thomas Campbell
- Алексей Плещеев – Твоя любовь мне утешенье
- They Thought Her Crazy by Mary Etta Metcalf
- For Hans Carossa by Rainer Maria Rilke
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).