The Dark Well

They see you as they see you, A poor farmer with no name, Ploughing cloudward, sowing the wind With squalls of gulls at the day's end. To me you are Prytherch, the man Who more than all directed my slow Charity where there was need. There are two hungers, hunger for bread And hunger of the uncouth soul For the light's grace. I have seen both, And chosen for an indulgent world's Ear the story of one whose hands Have bruised themselves on the locked doors Of life; whose heart, fuller than mine Of gulped tears, is the dark well From which to draw, drop after drop, The terrible poetry of his kind.