The Seven Days Of Creation

The First Day

How can it be thought?
Only as children look
At pictures in a book:—
Here Is comes of Nought.

A waste gloom of wet,
And then a voice saying, Light.
So there is dark and bright,
No form or colour yet.

When did the world start,
On what day of the week?
The first day, of course.

Can words have such force?
Well, poets claim the art
To enact the thing they speak …

The Second Day

With sluice-holes for the rain,
The firmament of sky
Can keep all heaven high
But let it bless the plain.

There must be an above
Because there's a below:
The story-tellers know
Things they don't have to prove.

And every cosmic plan
Becomes a map of mind,
The structure of a man.

Over the mere of mud
The sky-vault holds confined
The lightnings and the flood.

The Third Day

What violent rich tapestry
The generative powers unfold!
With lichen, roses, wort, and mould,
Gingko, fern, and sesame.

Close your dazzled eyes and see
A spurt of symbols on the screen,
Jack the Giantkiller's bean,
Or Yggdrasil, the tallest tree.

The dry dividing from the wet,
The cycad from the diatom,
The world is ready for surprise:

In a moist warm ground is set
The star-shaped seed that will become
The midmost tree of paradise.

The Fourth Day

The sun's glory by day,
The moon to rule the night,
Comets to give fright
And stars to show the way.

The dragon, with one swish
Of his heraldic tail,
Scrapes glittering clouds of scale
From the celestial Fish.

And so too, at the end,
Men's hearts will be afraid
Of what the signs portend.

Yet still, from where we are,
One sign at least is clear,
One ungazetted star.

The Fifth Day

Tomorrow is the time
Of the Paradisal Man.
In first darkness he began,
A soup of slime.

Tomorrow will emerge
From every living form,
From anther, tendril, bud, and corm,
This strident urge.

In him will be comprised
The world as animal:
Organs in their dim cabal

Imparadised;
Eye, membrane, genital—
The flesh of Christ.

The Sixth Day

Pollen on the tacky stigma,
Sperm loose-shining in the tide,
The deep join of need and pride
By which life pierces the enigma—

In you I find defined anew,
Not truly kept except in you;
And my flesh, having been made two,
Is one in what we are and do.

Our world's name is bliss;
I the firmament, you the earth,
Like sun and rain I am poured forth.

Enormously strange it is,
Forever to be you and I,
Not to die, not ever to die.

The Seventh Day

Stillness is highest act,
Therefore be still and know
The pattern in the flow,
The reason in the fact.

Sabbath of the mind:
The beaked implacable
Tearing of the will
Arrested and defined.

Not to need either
To kill or to possess
Is a day's clear weather.

The grinding stops; we untether
The abused beast, and confess
We've heard of happiness.