Diana the Huntress
Poems by John Pilkey
School of Fontainebleau. Diana the Huntress (1550s)
The school of Fontainebleau has done you proud,
so elegantly upright, so unloud,
so carelessly immortal as a cloud
floats everywhere at once.
Your stride has never known the strap of sandal,
sweeps onward past the eyes of dying scandal,
indifferent to covetous who handle
low treasures of the earth.
The hound that charges straight beside your heel
enacts unspoken dictates of your will
and translates lofty motion into kill
whatever turns and flees.
Your eyes ignore the pride of always knowing
wherever heel and hound are swiftly going
beyond the reach of birth and death and growing
into sylvan silence.
Your overmastered prey the lonely stag
to chase, take aim, strike down and drag
beside a mountain stream or hanging crag
is even I myself.
For I am the Actaeon who rebelled
against your law when I beheld
your immortality that loosely held
the bow of life and death.
John Davis Pilkey
