Things That Need Poem by Robert Rorabeck

About the milky rind of the green hills,
The low song plays-
And the girls come out and dance atop of
The comely graves:
They lose their feet in the slow heartbeat of
Grass,
As the sun is a troubadour above
The sunken overpass:
And they sing to kiss the sweat, and to smell
The nocturnal rind:
They step out barefooted and dance to see what
They can find,
As the streets pool out beneath them far
Beneath them, like ribbons in tangles beneath them:
And the sea listens to them, and eats
Their echoes like pie: and takes their echoes
To the other shore for the men there to listen to them-
The men there who want to die for want of them,
And the sea laughs as they leap into her:
All of them into her, and she sings to them of
Things that must soon die, but she also sings to them
Of things that need not ever die.