Guarding the cattle on my native hill
This was my talisman. Its charm was known
High in the blue and aquiline ozone,
And by my tireless armourer, the rill,
Smoothing his pellets to my hand or eye:
And how its meteors sang into the sky
The eagles of the Berg remember still.
I wore this herdsman’s bracelet all day long:
To me it meant ‘To-morrow’ and ‘Perhaps’,
The insults of Goliath, his collapse,
Much fighting, and (who knows?) a life of song.
So fine a jewel at his wrist to swing
(For it was Chance) has seldom graced a king—
As I have dangled on a rawhide thong.
It spelt me luck in every polished stone
That to its mark, or thereabouts, had won:
For it had been to a poor herdsman’s son
A stirrup once, to vault into a throne
And ride a nation over its despair;
To me, it seemed an amulet of prayer,
Remembering David and the warrior Joan.
I thought of the incendiary hope
Such herdsmen brought to cities from the hills.
Taught by the rash example of the rills,
Leaping in fire, to rush the headlong slope,
To gather impetus for height that’s lost,
And hurtle through, regardless of the cost,
Where cunning or precaution have no scope.
When I have felt the whiff of madness’ wing,
And rioted in barrios of shame,
Where all they gave me was a thirsty flame,
To burn my lips, that could no longer sing—
Around my fevered pulse to cool the flame,
There ghosted at my wrist an airy sling
And drew me to a garden, or a spring.
My link, in its long absence, with delight:
My handcuff (if I looked upon a knife)
That chained me to the miracle of life
Through a long frost and winter of the sprite:
And ready, at most need, to arm my prayer,
As once, when cries and feathers filled the air,
It saved a silver egret from a kite.
When stranded on these unfamiliar feet
Without a horse, and in the Stranger’s land,
Like any tamest Redneck to your hand,
I shuffled with the Charlies in the street
Forgetting I was born a Centaur’s foal;
When like the rest, I would have sawn my soul
Short at the waist, where man and mount should meet—
Its tightened thong would jerk me to control,
And never let the solar memory set
Of those blue highlands which are Eden yet
For all the rage of dynamite or coal—
Whose sunrise is the vision that I see then,
That, hurled like Bruce’s heart amongst the heathen,
Leads on our White Commando to its goal!
Where none break ranks though down the whole race treks,
It taught me how to separate, and choose;
The uniform they ordered, to refuse—
The hornrimmed eyes, the ringworm round their necks;
And, when the Prince of herdsmen rode on high,
To rope those hikers with that bolshie tie,
To save my scruff, and see without the specs:—
Choosing my pebbles (to distinguish, free)
I had dispensed with numbers; finding how,
Since Space was always Here as Time was Now,
Extent of either means a Fig to me;
To the whole field I can prefer a flower
And know that States are foundered by an hour
While centuries may groan to fell a tree.
By its cool guidance I unread my books
And learned, in spite of theories and charts,
Things have a nearer meaning to their looks
Than to their dead analyses in parts;
And how (for all the outfit be antique)
Our light is in our heads; and we can seek
The clearest information in our hearts.
It taught me to inflict or suffer pain:
That my worst fortune was to serve me right,
And though it be the fashion to complain,
Self-pity is the ordure of the sprite,
But faith its ichor; and though in my course,
A rival knot the grass to spill my horse,
That trusting all to luck is half the fight.
It taught me that the world is not for Use;
But is, to each, the fruit of his desire,
From whose superb Grenade to swill the juice,
Some thaw its rosy frost into a fire—
Leaving the husks they most expect to find
To those insisting on the horny rind;
For it rewards as we to it aspire.
So ripe a fruit, so ruddy, and so real!—
To-night it bleeds, as when in days gone by
(Aldebaran a rowel at my heel)
I rounded up the cattle on the sky
Against the Berg’s Toledo-steepled walls—
As now, upon the mesas of Castile
Beside the city that it most recalls.
For him whose teeth can crack the bitter rind—
Still to his past the future will reply,
And build a sacred city in his mind
With singing towers to thunder in the wind:
To light his life will shine the herdsman King
Who whirls our great Pomegranate in his sling
To herd the other planets through the sky.
Slung at his wrist will hang the phantom stress
Of David’s stone—to weigh that all is right;
Even to daunt him should the weak unite
In one Goliath, he’ll accept and bless,
Whose home’s the Earth, and Everywhere his bed
A sheepskin saddle to his seat or head,
And Here and Now his permanent address.