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What daybreak of your body's shade has passed
into this crystallizing of a tear,
this clutching at the moulded air
with new inverted hands of animal?
Or did they sleep, who thought themselves
to be your father, fashioning another
love than night, and seek a mother
not your own, but with her crescent smile
around the wasted cycle of the year
and test with words the words they heard her speak
strange with rebellion, and suddenly in meek
submission turned to weaker will?
Where had the voice departed, where
the shadows that had formed her skin, and now
had left their fruit no courage to enow
the day with argument, or prove the night;
the half moon falling on her face till you
were born, and all like dead memory cut free
lay in her hands like some old ivory
and fell to life, a gift beyond refusing.
From some unthought-of hand strange
music lifts, strained life awakes
from struggle into noise, this change it makes,
and, like the sound, bears generations in it:
and now the leaves displace their heaviness
and leave her throat to words she would
not say, and with this being in her eyes should
not remember at the drowning of her ship of speech, -
and this is all the end or some beginning
unwritten in her hand, which joins her voices
into unison and overrules the choices
which, in your body's daybreak had existed never.
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