Earth (IV of The Elements)

Fairest earth
fount of life, giver of bodies
deep well of our delight, breath of desire
let us come to you
barefoot, as befits love, as the boy to the trembling girl
as the child to the mother
seeking above all things the honesty of substance
touch of soil and wind and rock
frost and flower and water
the honey of the senses, the food
of love's imagining; and the most intimate
touch of love, that turns to being;
deriving wisdom, and the knowledge of necessity
building thereon, stone by stone
the rational architecture of truth, to house
the holy flame, that is neither reason nor unreason
but the thing given,
the flame that burns blue in the stillness, hovering
between the green wood of the flesh and the smoke of death

Fair earth, we have broken our idols;
and after the days of fire we shall come to you
for the stones of a new temple.

A. R. D. Fairbairn

Fairbairn wrote too much, as I complained in poem 19.html . Even this one
- tho' by no means half-baked - has a bit in the middle that didn't rise
properly. Still, he has managed to write a good poem about materialism,
and I bet you didn't think that was possible!!

Actually, thinking about it a bit more, later, i might edit this poem out of the chain, on the fashionable grounds that Fairbairn turns out not to have been quite as left-wing as poets of his generation should have been. He was no friend of the Labour Government of 1935-49. I think i'll cancel him.....

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