Dawn

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 gleaming

With a clear pale light,

Was a flower who told me its name.

I laughed at the blond Wasserfall

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.