From “Odi Barbare”
XXIV
What is far hence led to the den of making:
Moves unlike wildfire | not so simple-happy
Ploughman hammers ploughshare his durum dentem
Digging the Georgics
Vision loads landscape | lauds Idoto Mater
Bearing up sacrally so graced with bodies
Voids the challenge how far from Igboland great-
Stallioned Argos
Vehemencies minus the ripe arraignment
Clapper this art taken to heart the fiction
What are those harsh cryings astrew the marshes
Weep not to hear them
Accolades Muses’ dithyrambics far-fraught
Borrowed labour ashen with sullen harrow
Cruel past that | Sidney and vesperal Tom
Campion courted
Put to claim not otherwise vowed the era
What else here goes | I am no Igbo wit well
Versed in Virgil Pindar Euripides child-
Hallowed Idoto
Revelation blessed in its unforthcoming
Closed with tempus aedificandi tempus
Destruendi bringing discharge of measure
Blasting the home-straight
XXV
Lovelace there come difficult times between us
Though in your place I cannot well imagine
Why I should not follow her chequered steps in-
Out of the sunlight
Candlelight here given the invocation
Starlit even | whatever else is silence
Gratiana somewhere still | she is dancing
Dancing⌒and ⌒singing
Singing not her heart out beyond the fable
Grand carotid arteries self-fulfilling
How the blood’s tempered in its modulation
Balanced impulsive
So are our storms trackered from solemn orbit
Turbulence granted our sequestered sphere now
Buffetted now spun on an awl now baffled
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poem by Geoffrey Hill
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