A LIENATION

A SENSE of tropic trouble,
Of beauty and fear ... I tremble.
For storm swerves ominous northward,
The Gulf grey-green under it,
And pelicans glide on planes of the wind
For a mile with a single wing-beat.
A porpoise, too, scallops the waves
With steel-swift plunges through them,
While a man-of-war hawk, high in the murk,
Points bow-wings at the moon-wraith.

What is the meaning of it —
This beautiful breath of terror?
Is Life again at a moment of new creativeness,
Which wild things wildly sense the inscrutable urge of?

The palms know, steeped in the sultry mood of it,
And the veriest insects driven to shelter in them.
But I, like God, too far from Nature
Can only tremble and wonder.