The Curse.

 And yet she knows what it is to love,

knows, in her heart, the feeling,

can, with some passion, declare:

'I love, I love, I love my hair!'

Object of her fondest ministrations,

 she clearly does love her hair,

delights in its abundance,

 in its russet fires,

in its flow and fall,

 in its warm cascades,

in all its sight and feel,

 and, indeed,  in its intimacy;

for the joy that is her hair

 is a joy that is ever near.

Such love, you protest, is but vanity,

and yet, I say, there is in it something,

 something that is ..... holy!

It is the holiness of the sacred place, 

 the place of solemn retreat,

of most private confession,

 of most secret truth.

For if you, I, or any lusty male,

 misreading the messages of her mouth,

its liberal words and confident smiles,

were to prove so bold as to trespass there,

to seek, of a sudden, to kiss those lips,

she need but bow her head,

 and, cascades now curtains, and closing,

she may instant sanctuary find.

Such a scene abruptly come to pass,

 all now silent, grave, unbearable,

and not content just to sit and wait 

 and not even dreaming to apologise,

perhaps not at all the respectful sort,

you then dared, desecration!,

 to part, if only ever so little,

that veil of hair and peek within,

you would see there, in the gloom,

 as in some dim recess of an empty church,

a face so firmly set, so far withdrawn,

so stunned, so numb, so frozen,

as to lead any witness to conclude

 that one lifetime might not prove adequate

to undo so tight a bandage,

to .... unkiss so deep a spell.

And yet, and yet, surely one might hope, 

surely one might well have faith

 that there is nothing come of life

that life cannot make right,

 that there is no mind so cursed,

no poor child so unfortunate,

 so profoundly marred, mucked up,

whether by the vagaries of chance

 or by the slow work of malign powers,

to be beyond the healing reach

of Nature.