dots-menu
×

Home  »  Poetica Erotica  »  Songs of Creation: Eté

T. R. Smith, comp. Poetica Erotica: Rare and Curious Amatory Verse. 1921–22.

Songs of Creation: Eté

By Zella Muriel Wright
 
(From A Pagan Anthology, 1918)

IT is good to be loved.
A man waits for me
Who will cover my body with kisses;
He will bury his face in my hair;
He will weep with joy at the touch of me.        5
It is good to be loved.
 
I wait for you in the dusk.
How strange you seem tonight!
Your eyes glisten with a burnished light,
Like the eyes of a serpent,        10
Like the eyes of a god.
Wherever your eyes are turned upon me
My flesh burns
As tho two hot coals were laid upon it;
But I do not move.        15
Why do you never take your eyes from me?
Why do you tremble and grow so pale,
You who were so radiant and rigid
A moment ago?
You touch me and drop weakly in a heap;        20
There is no power in your muscles.
But it is only the weakness before madness;
A madness that gives you a ten-fold strength.
For a second I shrink with fear,
Lest in your ferocity, you devour me.        25
Then I laugh—my whole body laughs;
But I move not.
On my lips there is a faint smile,
Shall I tell you why I smile?
 
I smile because I am happy;        30
Because this instant is my instant
In this eternity of eternities.
Tonight I understand that life is not
The groping, broken, half-thing
It has always seemed.        35