Traveling over your body I found

The failing olive and the cajoling flute,

Where I knelt down, as if in prayer,

And sucked a moist pit

From the marl

Of the earth in a sacred cove.


You gave yourself to the god who comes,

The liberator of the loud shout,

While I fell into a trance,

Blood on my lips,

And stumbled into a temple on top

Of a hill at the bottom of the sky.

Copyright © 2013 by Edward Hirsch. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on April 25, 2013. Browse the Poem-a-Day archive.