In The White Giant's Thigh - Dylan Thomas

Through throats where many rivers meet the curlews cry

Under the conceiving moon on the high chalk hill

And there this night I walk in the white giant's thigh

Where barren as boulders women lie longing still

To labour and love though they lay down long ago

Through throats where many rivers meet the women pray

Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow

Though the names on their w**d grown stones are rained

Away

And alone in the night's eternal curving act

They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived

And immemorial sons of the cudgelling hacked

Hill who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved

In the courters' lanes or twined in the ox roasting

Sun

In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay

Clung to the pitching clouds or gay with any one

Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay

Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade

Petticoats galed high or shy with the rough riding

Boys

Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade

Who once green countries since were a hedgerow of

Joys

Time by their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly

Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush

Light of his thighs spreadeagle to the dunghill sky

Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun's bush

Rough as cows' tongues and trashed with brambles their

Buttermilk

Manes under his quenchless summer barbed gold to the

Bone

Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk

And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail

Stone

Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed

House

And heard the lewd wooed field flow to the coming

Frost

The scurrying furred small friars squeal in the dowse

Of day in the thistle aisles till the white owl

Crossed

Their breast the vaulting does roister the horned

Bucks climb

Quick in the wood at love where a torch of foxes

Foams

All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and

Chime

And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes

Or butter fat goosegirls bounced in a gambo bed

Their breasts full of honey under their gander king

Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen long dead

And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in

The spring

And their firefly hairpins flew and the ricks ran

Round

But nothing bore no mouthing babe to the veined hives

Hugged and barren and bare on Mother Goose's ground

They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives

Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their

Dust

The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro

Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust

As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low

And cut the birds' boughs that the minstrel sap ran

Red

They from houses where the harvest bows hold me hard

Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the

Dead

And the rain wring out it's tongues on the faded yard

Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall

Leaved

Grave after Beloved on the grass gulfed cross is

Scrubbed

Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved

Save by their long desirers in the fox cubbed

Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood to these

Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill

Love for ever meridian through the courters' trees

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires

Still