--- S E A N   S I N G E R

1

Through a bank of palmlight
Over the white-green surf

As if old women's hands
Break the day into gypsum dark

Night is worn
And night stars are worn
To a slumberous newness.


2

Old women go the green ways of Florida, under the flame-
Flung sun: formed beautiful with hymns and hymns;
Cocoon-white little girls are folded inside their tender part.

Cometh the women in the forms of the old.
Formed like flames are they in changing colors
Of pink, gold, and gold-whites;  The little girls sit

Inside the orange dark like wrinkled, soft balloons.
They that left their dying women through their throats
Float heavenward through the gold-black stripes of the afternoon.


3

Ethel Rosenberg flies over Florida and she is distant and simple.
For this she was born.  She is a tiger as big as the night.
Her children are grown, and they know all she came to know:
That she struggles in the humid air as if the hugeness of the clouds
Was the hugeness of the chair and its shock
And its shock and its shock.  A thousand feet
Beyond even if she never knew Russian or uranium.
She keeps high, black sun, orange sun, looking
At the old women, wordless at the rhapsody of her possible life.