G. Hill passed away but he's still with us.

GENESIS BY Geoffrey Hill

Against the burly air I strode Crying the miracles of God.

And first I brought the sea to bear Upon the dead weight of the land; And the waves flourished at my prayer, The rivers spawned their sand.

And where the streams were salt and full The tough pig-headed salmon strove, Ramming the ebb, in the tide’s pull, To reach the steady hills above.

II The second day I stood and saw The osprey plunge with triggered claw, Feathering blood along the shore, To lay the living sinew bare.

And the third day I cried: ‘Beware The soft-voiced owl, the ferret’s smile, The hawk’s deliberate stoop in air, Cold eyes, and bodies hooped in steel, Forever bent upon the kill.

III And I renounced, on the fourth day, This fierce and unregenerate clay,

Building as a huge myth for man The watery Leviathan,

And made the glove-winged albatross Scour the ashes of the sea Where Capricorn and Zero cross, A brooding immortality— Such as the charmed phoenix has In the unwithering tree.

IV The phoenix burns as cold as frost And, like a legendary ghost, The phantom-bird goes wild and lost Upon a pointless ocean tossed.

So, the fifth day, I turned again To flesh and blood and the blood’s pain.

V On the sixth day, as I rode In haste about the works of God, With spurs I plucked the horse’s blood.

By blood we live, the hot, the cold, To ravage and redeem the world: There is no bloodless myth will hold.

And by Christ’s blood are men made free Though in close shrouds their bodies lie Under the rough pelt of the sea.

Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight The bones that cannot bear the light.