A. D. Hope

“Poems of A. D. Hope”

“Darwin's daughters have no tails, Yet a reminiscent motion Agitates the lovely frails At the seat of amputation. {{pb}} Charles called Eve and Adam lies And denied the garden state, Yet the gait of Paradise Could not wholly liquidate.”

“No hunter of the Age of Fable Had need to buckle in his belt; More game than he was ever able To take ran wild upon the veldt; Each night with roast he stocked his table, Then procreated on the pelt. And that is how, of course, there came At last to be more men than game.”

“Remembering how I planned to break the journey, to drive My own car one day, to have choice in my hands and my foot upon power, To see through the trumpet throat of vertiginous perspective My urgent Now explode continually into flower, {{pb}} To be the Eater of Time, a poet and not that sly Anus of mind the historian. It was so simple and plain To live by the sole, insatiable influx of the eye. But something went wrong with the plan: I am still on the train.”

“Quaking muscles in the act of birth,Between her legs a pigmy face appear,And the first murderer lay upon the earth.”

“Adam had learned the jolly deed of kind:He took her in his arms and there and thenLike the clean beasts, embracing from behind,Began in joy to found the breed of men.”

“Her bulk of beauty, her stupendous grace Challenged the lion heart in his puny dust. Proudly his Moment looked him in the face: He rose to meet it as a hero must; Climbed the white mountain of unravished snow, Planted his tiny flag upon the peak. {{pb}} The smooth drifts, scarcely breathing, lay below. She did not take the trouble to smile or speak. And afterwards, it may have been in play, The enormous girl rolled over and squashed him flat; And as she could not send him home that way, Used him thereafter as a bedside mat.”

“And her five cities, like teeming sores,Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-stateWhere second-hand Europeans pullulateTimidly on the edge of alien shores. {{pb}} Yet there are some like me turn gladly home From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find The Arabian desert of the human mind, Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come, {{pb}} Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes Which is called civilization over there.”