Think of our blindness where the water burned!
Are we so certain that those wings, returned And turning, we had half discerned Before our dazzled eyes had surely seen The bird aloft there, did not mean?— Our hearts so seized upon the sign!
Think how we sailed up-wind, the brine Tasting of daphne, the enormous wave Thundering in the water cave— Thunder in stone.
And how we beached the skiff And climbed the coral of that iron cliff And found what only in our hearts we’d heard— The silver screaming of that one, white bird:
The fabulous wings, the crimson beak That opened, red as blood, to shriek And clamor in that world of stone,
No voice to answer but its own.
What certainty, hidden in our hearts before,
Found in the bird its metaphor?
