Classic Poem

Let there be shelters built in the wild fern
For girls at their first sickness; also hovels
Of green thorn on the hills for the times of women:
Let there be laws inscribed for the keeping of chastity
And knots made to number the days of the moon:
Otherwise harm will come of it!

Why should we be
Ashamed if it were not so? Why should we sleep
At noon with our knees bent in the darkness of plantains?
Why have we not uncovered ourselves in the sight
Of grown girls or gone by day through the paths
To the named place in the straw under the fruit trees?

Let them be crushed with stones who are found together.
Let their sex be consumed with lime and their bodies
Burned on the roots of trees slabbered by cattle.
I tell you evil will come of it. Young girls
Will draw us at dawn to the doors giving on silence
And women with loosened garments will bring us in
To the long room where the sun stands among columns:
We shall be overheard: we shall speak aloud
Telling them all! all! … and the vacant light,
The bright void, the listening, idiot silence …

Love, I said, O my love! and I leaned upon her.
I told her my heart in the soft fall of the plum blossoms.
Suddenly there were leaves stirred in the wind,
The sun was there! The sky stood there behind me!
“Ha,” I said, “Are you fair?” Look! “Are you honest?”
I was betrayed. I rose from her.
No, not I ;
I never gave you aught.

I tell you we must be dumb in the earth, else
Evil will come of it: we shall be understood.
The thing will be known before time and prevented.
Those who can speak with foolishness, let them be heard:
The rest shall be still, the rest shall watch and keep silence.

And the bodies of those that die of love upon childbed,
Let them be buried in sand in a strange place.
Let them be put away far from their people.
It is a shameful thing. It has been forbidden.