I saw a red and hollow skull
That looked like blood upon my door;
It was perhaps some ancestor
Buried long since beneath the floor.

Whose flesh had rotted in the earth,
Whose bones were fibre-fragments now;
But yet whose phantom seemed to flow
Around my blood and through my brow.

In nerve and brain I feel the past
Assembling my material frame;
Archaic haemoglobins seem
To spell my longer truer name -

Which is the name of every man
From Adam to myself - and you!
Of snake and lemur, kangaroo
Of sponge and of amoeba too.

An alphabet of hidden forms
With myriad ciphers, codes and plans;
In which all speech and thought begins -
Societies and tribes and clans.

Out of the earth I took my shapes -
Light animates my growing seed -
The wonder of the hominid
Embodied in the human breed.

An age-old fear projects this skull
On my imagination's screen,
Bloody and red with ghastly grin -
It is a semblance of man's ruin.