Green fingers <br />holding the hillside, <br />mustard whipping in <br />the sea winds, one blood-bright <br />poppy breathing in <br />and out. The odor <br />of Spanish earth comes <br />up to me, yellowed <br />with my own piss. <br /> 40 miles from Málaga <br />half the world away <br />from home, I am home and <br />nowhere, a man who envies <br />grass. <br /> Two oxen browse <br />yoked together in the green clearing <br />below. Their bells cough. When <br />the darkness and the wet roll in <br />at dusk they gather <br />their great slow bodies toward <br />the stalls. <br /> If my spirit <br />descended now, it would be <br />a lost gull flaring against <br />a deepening hillside, or an angel <br />who cries too easily, or a single <br />glass of seawater, no longer blue <br />or mysterious, and still salty.<br /><br />Philip Levine<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/holding-on/
