Roots

O heavily weighing earth! O grim travail
In sunless silence with no hope of light!
O impotent wine! O bracken-food of pain!
I accept you all. I accept the timeless blight
Of crawling like a worm with unclean things,
Of being forever a yearning voiceless root
Bedded in this unwarmed oblivion
So that the great sun mellow my ultimate fruit.

Credit

From On a Grey Thread (Will Ransom, 1923) by Elsa Gidlow. This poem is in the public domain.