from The Flowering of the Rod

I go where I love and where I am loved,

into the snow;

I go to the things I love

with no thought of duty or pity;

I go where I belong, inexorably,

as the rain that has lain long

in the furrow; I have given

or would have given

life to the grain;

but if it will not grow or ripen

with the rain of beauty,

the rain will return to the cloud;

the harvester sharpens his steel on the stone;

but this is not our field,

we have not sown this;

pitiless, pitiless, let us leave

The-place-of-a-skull

to those who have fashioned it.