Is it less than your brilliance, Ishtar,
How the snowfield smarts in the fresh sun,
And the bells of its melting ring, and we blink
At the light flexing in trickles?
It is the Spring’s disgrace
That already, before the prone arbutus
Will risk its whiteness, you have come down
To the first gate and darkened.
Forgive us, who cannot conceive you
Elsewhere and maiden, but love you only
Fallen among us in rut and furrow,
In the shade of amassing leaves,
Or scrawny in plucked harvest,
Your losses having fattened the world
Till crownless, starless, you stoop and enter
The low door of Irkalla.
There too, in the year’s dungeon
Where love takes you, even our itch
For defilement cannot find you out,
Your death being so perfect.
It is all we can do to witness
The waste motions of empty trees,
The joyless tittering duff, the grass-mats
Blanched and scurfy with ice,
And in the desert heat
Of vision force from rotten sticks
Those pure and inconceivable blooms
Which, rising, you bear beyond us.
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