devastating. Still, the joy was there also, you spoke truly, The joy was not to be driven off so easily; Stronger than fear or destructive mother-love, it stood flickering; The frogs helped also, whirring away. Yet how I have learned to know that look in your eyes Of horrid sorrow! How I know that glitter of salt, dry, sterile, sharp, corrosive salt! Not tears, but white sharp brine Making hideous your eyes. I have seen it, felt it in my mouth, my throat, my chest, my belly, Burning of powerful salt, burning, eating through my defenceless nakedness. I have been thrust into white, sharp crystals, Writhing, twisting, superpenetrated. Ah, Lot's Wife, Lot's Wife! The pillar of salt, the whirling, horrible column of salt, like a waterspout That has enveloped me! Snow of salt, white, burning, eating salt In which I have writhed. Lot's Wife!—Not Wife, but Mother. I have learned to curse your motherhood, You pillar of salt accursed. I have cursed motherhood because of you, Accursed, base motherhood! I long for the time to come, when the curse against you will have gone out of my heart. But it has not gone yet. Nevertheless, once, the frogs, the globe-flowers of Bavaria, the glow-worms      Gave me sweet lymph against the salt-burns, There is a kindness in the very rain. Therefore, even in the hour of my deepest, pas-         sionate malediction I try to remember it is also well between us. That you are with me in the end. That you never look quite back; nine-tenths, ah, more You look round over your shoulder; But never quite back. Nevertheless the curse against you is still in my heart Like a deep, deep burn. The curse against all mothers. All mothers who fortify themselves in motherhood, devastating the vision. They are accursed, and the curse is not taken off It burns within me like a deep, old burn, And oh, I wish it was better. BEUERBERG 

  

  

 ON THE BALCONY 

      IN front of the sombre mountains, a faint, lost ribbon of rainbow; And between us and it, the thunder; And down below in the green wheat, the labourers Stand like dark stumps, still in the green wheat. You are near to me, and your naked feet in their sandals, And through the scent of the balcony's naked timber I distinguish the scent of your hair: so 

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