Interlude, with Pomegranates

This wonderful piece was forwarded to me from Orchidwile, who placed it (having no other recourse) in the comments for Fruit:

The Mad Pomegranate Tree

In these bright courtyards where the south wind blows
Whistling through vaulted arches, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who leaps in light scattering her fruitful laugh
With wind’s stubbornness and whispering, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who quivers the dawn with foliage newborn
Opening all her colors aloft with a shiver of triumph?

When in awakening fields naked girls
Harvest clover with blond hands
Roaming the ends of their sleep, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who unsuspecting places lights in their verdant baskets
Who overflows their names with birdsong, tell me
Is it the mad pomegranate tree who fights the world’s cloudy skies?

On the day that jealousy adorns herself with seven kinds of feathers
Girding the eternal sun with thousands of blinding
Prisms, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who running seizes a man with a hundred lashes
Never sad and never grumbling, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who shouts the new hope now dawning?

Tell me, is it the mad pomegranate tree who greets the expanse
Fluttering a leaf handkerchief of cool fire
A sea about to give birth to a thousand ships
With waves that a thousand times move and go
To unscented shores, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who creaks the rigging aloft in pellucid aether?

Very high with the glaucous skycluster that lights and celebrates
Proud, full of danger, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who mid-world breaks the demon’s storms with light
Who spreads from end to end the saffron bib of day
Richly embroidered with sown songs, tell me is it the mad pomegranate tree
Who hastily unhooks the silks of the day?

In petticoats of April first and cicadas of August fifteenth
Tell me, she who plays, she who rages, she who seduces
Casting off from threat its evil black glooms
Pouring intoxicating birds on the sun’s bosom
Tell me, she who opens her wings on the breast of things
On the breast of our deep dreams, is it the mad pomegranate tree?

— Odysseus Elytis, Orientations 1939