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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edward Hirsch

Born in Chicago in 1950, Edward Hirsch is a poet and literary advocate. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), received the National Book Critics Circle Award...
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	FURTHER READING


		Poems About Passion and Sex
		9. by E. E. Cummings

		Canterbury Tales, Wife of Bath's Prologue [Excerpt] by Geoffrey Chaucer

		A Sequence by Leslie Scalapino

		Almost There by Timothy Liu

		Antique by Arthur Rimbaud

		Arts & Sciences by Philip Appleman

		Aubade: Some Peaches, After Storm by Carl Phillips

		Blue by May Swenson

		Boston by Aaron Smith

		Carrefour by Amy Lowell

		corydon & alexis, redux by D. A. Powell

		Elegy 5 by Ovid

		Erotic Energy by Chase Twichell

		First Turn to Me... by Bernadette Mayer

		Fish Fucking by Michael Blumenthal

		Fixed by Christopher Stackhouse

		He Asked About the Quality— by C. P. Cavafy

		In Praise of Shame by Lord Alfred Douglas

		Kinky by Denise Duhamel

		Libido by Rupert Brooke

		Me in Paradise by Brenda Shaughnessy

		National Nudist Club Newsletter by Wayne Koestenbaum

		No Platonic Love by William Cartwright

		Novel by Arthur Rimbaud

		Poems of Passion and Sex

		Prague by Khadijah Queen

		Privilege of Being by Robert Hass

		Remember, Body ... by C. P. Cavafy

		Safe Sex by Donald Hall

		Sex by Michael Ryan

		Song by James Joyce

		Stones by Michael Blumenthal

		The Ecstasy by Phillip Lopate

		The Elephant is Slow to Mate by D.H. Lawrence

		The Hug by Thom Gunn

		To His Mistress Going to Bed by John Donne

		Wild Rose by Bryher

		XIII by César Vallejo

		Year of the Tiger by Miguel Murphy

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A Greek Island

by Edward Hirsch

Traveling over your body I found

The failing olive and the cajoling flute,

Where I knelt down, as if in prayer,

And sucked a moist pit

From the marl

Of the earth in a sacred cove.

You gave yourself to the god who comes,

The liberator of the loud shout,

While I fell into a trance,

Blood on my lips,

And stumbled into a temple on top

Of a hill at the bottom of the sky.

About this poem:

"The poem takes a phrase ('C’est l’olive pâmée, et la flûte câline') from an obscene parody of Albert Mérat by Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine ('Sonnet du trou du cul') and develops it into an erotic poem. Now the body of the body becomes a sacred site, a Greek island."

Edward Hirsch

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