Worship

 

Every woman’s an altar,

But most altars leave me cold –

Too meager and ascetic, or else

Grown overrich on indulgences;

 

Too ancient, perhaps – too dark-ancestral;

Or newfangled, cultish, coltish, untried;

Too redolent of foreign mysteries –

Or blandly secular, as dry as fact.

 

Yet here you are, fresh as the new-born dawn,

And timeless as the timeless, anxious hope

That wells in me when I again behold

Those pureblue eyes, those winedark dusky brows –

 

And I am suddenly, fervently, religious –

Ready to kneel, to mumble, to adore –

To alter everything for a single glimpse

Of the sacred mystery at the center of you.