Everything is good but broken, <br />And when she calls out now there is no fear, <br />But challenge, <br />Naked in the firmament of graveyards <br />Above the hills of the defeated ghosts of Rome, <br />She sees all the things which men have seen <br />And names them her own, <br />And carves them handily with the wind she breathes: <br />For centuries she has slipped caves into rocks, <br />And petted the back of the ancients seas until they foamed. <br />When she comes now she does so rattling <br />The window frame, knocking on the doors of drowsing homes. <br />Absently, she pollinates the rocky meadows, <br />And tussles the backs of mauve foxes, and kisses <br />The open lips of the water lilies, giving them pirouettes in the <br />Silken canals, gives berth under the wings of moonlit owls, <br />And thus cries around the continents, <br />Weeping for those things which cannot be born of her, <br />The children she can only shape once they are gone, <br />Thus removing the chiseled epitaphs of gravestones, <br />And shushing mountains back again into the coy seas.<br /><br />Robert Rorabeck<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/her-breath/
