The Archaeology of Love


You have netted this dawn
From a sea of night
By the moon risen
To find what we forgot,
The palace where
A good prince walked
And a young leopard
Couched on the trees
While suns of oranges
Rose in the orchard.

In less than an hour's
Eternal defeat
By galleys grooving
On the water hate
And oil of peace
In the cruse blazing,
Home became for us
The burning sea
And language a hiss
In the wood of oars.

Through the gorge of fate
We climbed one by one
To a scorpion plain
Dry with poppies
To bury the gold
They gave for our bodies
And I passed those years
Dumb below pines
To barter freedom
In the land of quince.

By the nets of your grace
I am brought from ash
Of time's shopkeepers
Under the wave
To this island garden
Airy with asphodel,
Your moon raking
my early corn
As the spades ring
On our lost foundation.

I have grown to restore
From dust each room
The earthquakes lower
In a spring of doom,
To pierce beyond the fire
The cypress court
With gryphons basking,
Wander in the snow
Of almonds just before
Those petals wasting.

You have taken this night
From sea a vase
Of that dawn in spring,
And the script resolves
To a phrase we love,
You have cut in me a gypsum sky
Happy with harvesters
Fluting the day
Into orange flowers.

You have turned for ever
A generation
Of solitude
Into this field of dawn,
Though doom in waves
Will always march over,
Where I have stood
Dumb below pines
You have brought the dead
To a grove of suns.


--Richard Murphy--