Return To Beauty Poem by Robert Rorabeck

How can I show you beauty,
If you will not first give it to me with your
Tongue,
And allow this fieldtrip of baby fat
Patrols to stroll through the capitol
Where important men have erected marble
Phallus’ to your legs:
The Mississippi, and The Colorado;
And to your breasts,
The Smoky Mountains, and The Rockies,
And to your sadness,
Niagara Falls and the lesser cataracts,
As to your wombs, The Atlantic and
The Pacific-
Thus we patrol you on your highways
Evacuating the tarnished gloom of inner cities,
Out to the heartlands where your chest
Rises like a child excited on a bicycle,
Trying to make it up the hill where you will
One day breastfeed my child;
Where the sky is your thoughtful brow shadowed
With troubles,
And yet the coolness of watercress when bent over
Me, like an apocryphal pieta, where I lay
About the briar patch of my easy work,
As if two doves alighted to make love in cotton
Field in between their perches of skyscrapers:
Feel my like the rich earth, and touch me as
Gently as you would the first evidence of life
Struggling from the furrows,
And in the secret thicket where we glide over
The muddy lake in our trusty tire swing,
Kiss me and show me the beauty which I longingly
Wish to return.