Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets, <br />machines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk <br />canvases, and he stops under the sky <br /> <br />and raises toward it his joined clenched fists. <br /> <br />Believers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that <br /> shines, <br /> <br />but those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends. <br /> <br />He cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into <br /> motley halves; <br />pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs: <br />throbs of pianos, children's cries, the thud of a head banging against <br /> the floor. <br />This is the only landscape able to make him feel. <br /> <br />He wonders at his brother's skull shaped like an egg, <br />every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow, <br />then one day he plants a big load of dynamite <br />and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the explosion. <br />Agape, he observes the clouds and what is hanging in them: <br />globes, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives. <br />They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle. <br />While below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose, <br /> flutters, <br />and a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered tracks.<br /><br />Czeslaw Milosz<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/artificer/
