Then the hard blue eye grew harder
Than the cold forms and fossils of nature,
And saw, inside that law of rock and bark, creatures
Crazed and crying cries of oil and ore.

And somewhere skin under skin the fetus kicks and kinks
Like a mile made of music, hairpin hornturns of a road
headed home —
As if the forming brain became a thing space thinks,
Felt the promise of petal and the day of the dome.

— Osip Mandelstam
(c. 1935)