Explore "Transfiguration" by Joyce Kilmer on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If it should be my task, I being God, / From whirling atoms to evolve your mate, / With hands omnipotent I should create / A great-souled hero, with the starlight shod. / The subject worlds should tremble at his nod / And all the angel host upon him wait / Yet he should leave his pomp and splendid state / And kneel to kiss the ground whereon you trod.
But God, who like a little child is wise, / Made me, a common thing of earthly clay; / Then bade me go and see within your eyes / The flame of love that burns more bright than day, / And as I looked I knew with wild surprise / I was transformed -- your heart in my heart lay.
When first the golden dawn of love was breaking / In your white soul, I kissed your gentle hand, / And all my heart with strange, sweet pain was aching, / A wild, new joy I could not understand.
And now, when I your slender fingers taking / Keep them enslaved to my hot lips' demand, / I feel that same strange thirst that knows no slaking / But then -- why should I wish to understand?