Her Breath Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Everything is good but broken,
And when she calls out now there is no fear,
But challenge,
Naked in the firmament of graveyards
Above the hills of the defeated ghosts of Rome,
She sees all the things which men have seen
And names them her own,
And carves them handily with the wind she breathes:
For centuries she has slipped caves into rocks,
And petted the back of the ancients seas until they foamed.
When she comes now she does so rattling
The window frame, knocking on the doors of drowsing homes.
Absently, she pollinates the rocky meadows,
And tussles the backs of mauve foxes, and kisses
The open lips of the water lilies, giving them pirouettes in the
Silken canals, gives berth under the wings of moonlit owls,
And thus cries around the continents,
Weeping for those things which cannot be born of her,
The children she can only shape once they are gone,
Thus removing the chiseled epitaphs of gravestones,
And shushing mountains back again into the coy seas.