Fireworks

By Dame Edith Sitwell

Pink faces (worlds or flowers or seas or stars)—
You all alike are patterned with hot bars

Of colored light; and, falling where I stand,
The sharp and rainbow splinters from the band

Seem fireworks, splinters of the Infinite
(Glitter of leaves the echoes) And the night

Will weld this dust of bright Infinity
To forms that we may touch and call and see:

Pink pyramids of faces: tulip-trees
Spilling night perfumes on the terraces.

The music, blond airs waving like a sea,
Draws in its vortex of immensity

The new-awakened flower-strange hair and eyes
Of crowds beneath the floating summer skies.

And against the silk pavilions of the sea
I watch the people move incessantly

Vibrating, petals blown from flower-hued stars
Beneath the music-fireworks’ waving bars;

So all seems indivisible, at one:
The flow of hair, the flowers, the seas that run—

A colored floating music of the night
Through the pavilions of the Infinite.

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