Not flower sweet nor tough as seaweed
Quiet it hangs —
Soft, Damp Spanish Moss
Spun fine as glass, as dreams
And so it grows
Unthought, uncut, unexpurged.
No Legion of Decency hair this
But wild unhairlike hair
Wrapped round impossible boats
Clinging there, growing there, aching there
Like poems in America
Like love
Like life, threatened in your mermaid sea
O hair of my daughter
Uncombed, unused to water
Medusa head —
For all that,
Still you produre.