A Greek Island
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.
"The poem takes a phrase ('C’est l’olive pâmée, et la flûte câline') from an obscene parody of Albert Mérat by Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine ('Sonnet du trou du cul') and develops it into an erotic poem. Now the body of the body becomes a sacred site, a Greek island."
Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch
Born in Chicago on January 20, 1950, Edward Hirsch is a poet and literary advocate. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (Knopf, 1986), received the National Book Critics Circle Award.