Think of our blindness where the water burned! <br />Are we so certain that those wings, returned <br />And turning, we had half discerned <br />Before our dazzled eyes had surely seen <br />The bird aloft there, did not mean?— <br />Our hearts so seized upon the sign! <br /> <br /> <br />Think how we sailed up-wind, the brine <br />Tasting of daphne, the enormous wave <br />Thundering in the water cave— <br />Thunder in stone. And how we beached the skiff <br />And climbed the coral of that iron cliff <br />And found what only in our hearts we’d heard— <br />The silver screaming of that one, white bird: <br />The fabulous wings, the crimson beak <br />That opened, red as blood, to shriek <br />And clamor in that world of stone, <br />No voice to answer but its own. <br /> <br /> <br />What certainty, hidden in our hearts before, <br />Found in the bird its metaphor?<br /><br />Archibald MacLeish<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-rock-in-the-sea/
