Poem of the day 42

I am returning to Lewis, as I have just got his collected poems, and I am transcribing this: given my avocation and occupation it is more telling that I want to admit.

Poem for Psychoanalyists and/or Theologians

Naked apples, woolly-coated peaches
Swelled on the garden’s wall. Unbounded
Odour of windless, spice-bearing trees
Surrounded my lying in sacred turf.
Made dense the guarded air — the forest of trees
Buoyed up therein like weeds in ocean
Lived without motion. I was the pearl,
Mother-of-pearl my bower. Milk-white the cirrhus
Streated the blue egg-shell of the distant sky,
Early and distant, over the spicy forest;
Wise was the fangless serpant, drowsy.
All this, indeed, I do not remember,
I remember the remembering, when first waking
I heard the golden gates behind me
Fall to, shut fast. On the flinty road,
Black-frosty, blown on with an eastern wind,
I found my feet. Forth on journey,
Gathering thin garment over aching bones,
I went. I wander still. But the world is round.

C. S. Lewis

Any transcription errors, alas, are mine.