When we touch the world   And it falls away   When we feel like we're born   Just to fall apart      And our mother lies in state   And the broken pitcher glistens   And the snow is at the window   Making neither sign nor symbol   And the earth covers earth   And the mud lies in pools      Where the sand-dunes stretch unbroken   And the dry wind bends and sighs   And the geese are running harmless   And our desires are running wild   When we're looking at the smoke   That's rising from the incense   Neither coming here nor going   Neither heaven here nor hell   Neither borning here nor birthing   Neither dying here nor death      And we're wrapped inside our troubles   And we're wrapped inside our pain   And wracked with fires with longing   And our eyes are blind with night   With our fingers clutching coins   And our thoughts burning with 'I'   And our eyes cannot be sated   With the world and its nightmares   With the world and its dreams   Though later they'll be filled   With a small handful of dust   And the gods appear on altars   And we recognise their face   It's a face that we have carved there   And it's full of fear and longing   And promises and threats   But they neither stoop to conquer   Nor do they stoop to praise   And the mines are void of diamonds   That we carry in our rags      And all the world seems   A sadness song   All the world seems   A sad sadness song               Fourteen long years she lies oh she lies oh   And love as she lies she dreams in white stone   Colonnade marbled and balcony empty   A broken band brokenly marks broken time   Fourteen long years she dreams oh she dreams oh   As dreamer she dreams on, as lover entwines   Her limbs grow round his limbs, she drinks from a bottle   She walks through the city she's lost and then found   Fourteen long years, further back scattered   She sits on some beach and reasons with him   In the secret red moist heart, the most loved and most dark   The flame shaft and fierce dart, the rose-leaf and moss-part   Spreadeagled like starfish, most pain and most fear   Like flower of sea-grass, most fragile and harmless   Most fiery and bloody, most childlike and wrinkled   This starfish, this spider, most wretched and great   ''Do not cry for me; let me show you the path   on which we neither come nor go''   She smiles at me lake-wide, wet-brown-eyed and dark-skinned   Some dark moon unmoved stalks through our loss   ''Do not spend this night with me;   I shall make the fallen blind see''   This too another broken toy, from broken girl gift to broken boy   I ask my sea-blue rushing mother:   ''Shall she hear the lions roar?''