I have kissed the summer dawn.
Before the palaces, nothing moved.
The water lay dead.
Battalions of shadows still kept the forest road.
I walked, waking an arm with vital breath,
While stones watched, and wings rose soundlessly.
My first adventure, in a path already
With a clear pale light,
Was a flower who told me its name.
I laughed at the blond
That threw its hair across the pines:
On the silvered summit,
I came upon the goddess.
Then, one by one,
I lifted her veils.
In the long walk, waving my arms.
Across the meadow, where I betrayed her to the cock.
In the heart of town she fled among steeples and domes,
And I hunted her, scrambling like a beggar on marble wharves.
Above the road, near a thicket of laurel,
I caught her in her gathered veils,
And smelled the scent of her immense body.
Dawn and the child fell together at the bottom of the wood.
When I awoke, it was noon.
