MARTINSON, Harry


Have you seen a tramp collier

Have you seen a tramp collier come out of a hurricane—

with broken booms, gunwales shot to pieces,

crumpled, gasping, come to grief—

and her captain gone all hoarse?

Snorting, she puts in at the sunlit wharf,

exhausted, licking her wounds

while the steam thins in her boilers.

The Visions

With fright in their eyes

the soldiers of salvation beheld

from the helmeted observatory tower: the heavenly harps;

the swaying, titanic nebulae

and their chaotic strings of gaseous gold.

Far off in the boundless crystal of places beyond time

where thought in fright

can plunge everlastingly through millennia

stirred the gaslike golden bowers of the harps

effervescing in Sagittarius.