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Madrigal of a Hedge Priest
A hedging priest among his sticks
Under the morning storm of rain,
He sees his windy weathers kick
The seagirls from the seaweed lanes.
He, with his cherry chain of beads
And all the starshorn Jacks and Jills,
Summons death for his livelong need
In a sabbath on a hedge of hills.
And down falls the double storm’s cross,
His service of day in the dead
Of night, in the lap of light, lost
And torn from the fountains of her head.
There in his doused and windswept cell
He can rehearse the magic white,
And black spite of the witches’ spell,
Charmed of the argumentative height,
And need no further covenant
For the motes of his shining eye:
Bhang of pyx that fires an adamant
Parhelion in the clouded sky.
This is the seaboard sacrifice
And Sunday wound, the bevy of lights
In the dancing dark, the shady dice
Of sevens in the spread of night.
And now his barefoot prayer from nave
To chancel, through thorns and altar gate,
And he falls in the seashore waves
To lie there and wait, and wait . . .
Till seagirls come with seaweed chains
And bind the asylums of his need.
Now mostly drowned, only silent cranes
Stand within the wrack of weeds.