As The Grapevine Is Wild

The sailors had been tormenting the prisoner now for long hours,
While all about the ship the white waters had raged.
And now, tired, they floated on a calm sea midst the powers
That had lapsed back into stillness and still had them caged.
The prisoner, a young man, hung without moving from the mast.
His voice was a surprise; he had stopped screaming long hours past.

"Do you know what you have done?" he asked the sailors in the quiet.
The sailors sneered at him and not one did deign to reply.
Undaunted, the prisoner said, "You should have noticed the riot
That began when you took me from under my homeland's sky.
It was not a riot of people, or you might have suspected
That you had captured the one who with madness dies and is resurrected."

The sailors looked at each other, and then the captain forward came,
Wielding a whip that lashed out to mark with a harsh iron tongue
The prisoner's body that bore too many marks of whip and flame.
The man did not react, as though already, so young,
He had learned that reacting to torture would not win him free.
He lifted his head, his dark purple eyes, to let them all see

That his face was dark with madness, wild passion, and despair.
His voice was the song of the wind that had blown them about.
"I will give you one more chance, because in some way I care
About all who have dared to brave wildness, to venture out
In such madness as was last night the protesting storm.
But I warn you: the anger in my veins has begun to grow warm."

The captain did not reply, but lashed out with the whip again.
Then he cried out on a long, high rising note, as if at a rape.
He dropped the whip, and backed away, and his staring men
Saw that the whip had become a vine loaded down with the grape
As had the ropes that bound their prisoner to the mast.
He brought down his hands and chafed his wrists, free at last.

"I did warn you," said the young man, and in his dark blond hair
They could see a ripple of green and purple, a growing grape crown.
His face drove a few of them mad, it was becoming so fair.
The vines twined around his head began to slither down.
"And know now my true name as courtesy, victims of mine:
I am Dionysus, lord of wild animals, madness, and wine!"

Then they fell on their knees and begged him to reconsider, relent.
They told him that they had not known of what kind he was.
They offered him the ship as a sacrifice, and as a present.
But the eyes of Dionysus do not move to pity without good cause.
He shook his head, and said, "The ship is no tribute I will accept.
And you would have captured an ordinary man as he slept,

"And subjected him to the same traps and whippings that you gave me.
I think not! Hear me now, children! Come, assume your true forms!
Become what you were meant to be! Hear me now, O sea!"
And the sea leaped up into the mother of all divine storms,
And Dionysus drew his pipe from his robes and began to dance,
While all around reality rewove itself at his violet glance.

The men became panthers, lions, bears and wolves and wild deer,
That danced around him as the ship was claimed by the vine.
Grapes and blossoms grew around the crow's nest high and sheer,
The sea spread in a dark purple stain as it tranformed into wine.
Dionysus had abandoned his pipe, and danced now like a child
To the music in his mind, which is wild as the grapevine is wild.

The ship turned for one moment into a floating mass of bright green,
And then sank tree-roots into the ocean bed, to stay yet a while.
Now in that place, a dark purple sea might still be seen,
And wild animals roaming at peace upon what is Dionysus's isle,
While in the center is a tree overgrown by blooms white as snow,
All that remains of the mast that tasted a god's blood long ago.