Page:Poems by Isaac Rosenberg (1922).djvu/101

 And the thewed strength of large beasts Moved and merged, gloomed and lit) Was speaking, surely, as the earth-men's earth fell away; Whose new hearing drank the sound Where pictures, lutes, and mountains mixed With the loosed spirit of a thought, Essenced to language thus—

"My sisters force their males From the doomed earth, from the doomed glee And hankering of hearts. Frail hands gleam up through the human quagmire, and lips of ash Seem to wail, as in sad faded paintings Far-sunken and strange. My sisters have their males Clean of the dust of old days That clings about those white hands And yearns in those voices sad: But these shall not see them, Or think of them in any days or years; They are my sisters’ lovers in other days and years."