Ted Hughes

In the beginning was Scream Who begat Blood Who begat Eye Who begat Fear Who begat Wing Who begat Bone Who begat Granite Who begat Violet Who begat Guitar Who begat Sweat Who begat Adam Who begat Mary Who begat God Who begat Nothing Who begat…

No, the serpent did not Seduce Eve to the apple.
All that's simply Corruption of the facts.
Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.

The grass is
To run like the sea, to be glossed like a mink’s
By polishing wind.
Her heart is the weather.

Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,
More coiled steel than living - a
Dark deadly eye, those delicate
Triggered to stirrings beyond sense - with a start, a bounce, a

The man who seems to be deadWith Buddha in his smile
With Jesus in his stretched out arms
With Mahomet in his humbled foreheadWith his feet in hell
With his hands in heaven…

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.
He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.

In a cage of
The size of a man's head, the macaw bristles in a
Combustion, suffers the stoking devils of his eyes.
In the old lady's parlour, where an aspidistra

Eased eyes open, showed leaves.
Eyes laughing and
Ran among flowers of leaves And looked at light's
Which led from leaf, upward, and back down to leaf.

The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,
Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,
A vast balloon,
Till it takes off, and sinks

Когда орел взлетел на истекающей изумрудом заре,
когда кулик на закате цедил морскую воду сквозь звон бокалов,
когда ласточка впорхнула в звучащую из пещеры женскую песню
и стриж промелькнул сквозь дыханье фиалки,…

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of
Thistles spike the summer
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.
Every one a revengeful

The mahogany table-top you
Had been the broad plank
Of my mother's heirloom sideboard-Mapped with the scars of my whole life.
That came under the hammer.

She gives him his eyes, she found
Among some rubble, among some
He gives her her
He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over

Freezing dusk is closing
Like a slow trap of
On trees and roads and hills and all
That can no longer feel.

I saw my world again through your
As I would see it again through your children's eyes.
Through your eyes it was foreign.
Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens

What am I?
Nosing here, turning leaves
Following a faint stain on the air to the river's edgeI enter water.
Who am I to

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold There is no telling where time is.
It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:

Looking at cows in their high-roofy roomy Windy home, mid-afternoon idling,
Late winter, near spring, the fields not greening,
The wind North-East and sickening, the
Shrinking, the year growing.

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

Похоже этот человек мертвБудда в его улыбке
Иисус в раскинутых руках
Магомет в поникшем лбеНоги его в преисподней
Руки его в небесах…

Who owns those scrawny little feet?
Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face?
Death.

She is struggling through grass-mesh - not flying,
Her wide-winged, stiff, weightless basket-work of
Rocking, like an antique wain, a top-heavy ceremonial
Across mountain summits(Not planing over water, dipping her tail)But…

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming -
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Crow, feeling his brain slip,
Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder.
Who murdered all these?
These living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood Till he is visibly black?