Tiger Lilies

They make me think of battlefields I saw
Where butterflies with wings of sulphurous gold
Crawled on gray faces death had made obscene
That stared with stolid dolls' eyes from the mold.
They make me think of pools of wimpled slime,
Where lizards bask upon the quaking crust,
And crumbling walls where hairy spiders weave
And snakes lie coupling in the summer dust.

I think it must have been along the Nile
That first these speckled membranes burst the pod,
Before the boy-flat breasts of some half-cat
Half-man and beryl-eyed Egyptian god.
Or first they grew about forgotten tombs
The apes inherit in hot jungles where
Like xanthic suns through aquid shade of leaves
A spotted leopard's dilate pupils stare.

These were the mottled blossoms of Gomorrah,
Wreathed on beast-gods by priestly Sodomites,
By Baal fires when the talking timbrel's sound
Fell from Astarte's groves on full moon nights.
They suck a yellow venom from the sun
And mid their reedy stocks there comes and goes
The forked, black lightning of a serpent's tongue
That hisses as his slippery body flows.

Such lilies bloom beside the gates of hell
And poison honey festers in their pods,
Olid as tales of lust told long ago
About the wanton mother of the gods.
And I would plant them by the lichened tomb
Of that veiled queen who died of leprosy
With two red princes smothered in her womb;
Their roots would feed on her in secrecy.