Bone-Flower Elegy by Robert Hayden

<p>Read by Terry Casburn</p><p>"Bone-Flower Elegy" by Robert Hayden</p><p>The poem describes a dream journey through different vast and intimidating locations, where erotic and violent scenes unfold on a stage. The speaker also encounters a haunting funeral chamber with a dancing naked corpse and comes upon groves of enormous, bone-like flowers in a desert, embodying both terrifying and tantalizing imagery. The poem concludes with a dichotomous creature, 'beast angel/angel beast', which embodies both violence and tranquility. According to the poem, the battle between what is right or what is wrong, between grotesque and beauty, may end on earth but it continues in death, it continues in the ideas of the living.</p>