Well Bottom Blues

Shame on all the advocates and aggregators of poetry that they have not gifted this one to the Internet.

Birth 
Milovz Czeslaw

For the first time he sees light. 
The world is garish light. 
He doesn’t know these are shrieks 
Of garish birds. Their hearts beat quickly 
Under enormous leaves. 
He doesn’t know birds live 
In another time than man. 
He doesn’t know a tree lives 
In another time than birds 
And will grow slowly 
Upward in a gray column 
Thinking with its roots 
Of the silver of underworld kingdoms. 

The last of the tribe, he comes 
After great magic dances. 
After the dance of the Antelope,
After the dance of the Winged Snakes 
Under an eternally blue sky 
In a valley of brick-red mountains. 
He comes after spotted thongs 
On a shield with a monster’s face, 
After deities who send down 
Dreams by their painted eyelid, 
After the rust of carved ships 
Which the wind has forgotten. 

He comes, after grating of swords 
And voice of battle horns, 
After the weird mass shriek 
In the dust of shattered brick 
After the flutter of fans 
Over a joke of warm teacups, 
After swan lake dances, 
And after a steam engine. 

Wherever he steps, there always 
Endures traced in sand 
A large-toed footprint 
Which clamors to be tried out 
By his childish foot arriving 
Out of the virgin forests. 
Wherever he goes, he always 
Will find on things of the earth 
A warm luster furbished 
By a human hand. 
This will never leave him, 
It will stay with him always, 
A presence close as breath, 
His only wealth. 

Washington, D.C., 1947