Amores
Page 5
If the joy that they are searching to avenge
Have risen red on my night as a harvest moon,
Which even death can only put out for me;
And death, I know, is better than not-to-be.
A PASSING BELL
MOURNFULLY to and fro, to and fro the trees are
waving;
_What did you say, my dear?_
The rain-bruised leaves are suddenly shaken, as a
child
Asleep still shakes in the clutch of a sob--
_Yes, my love, I hear._
One lonely bell, one only, the storm-tossed afternoon
is braving,
_Why not let it ring?_
The roses lean down when they hear it, the tender,
mild
Flowers of the bleeding-heart fall to the throb--
_It is such a little thing!_
A wet bird walks on the lawn, call to the boy to come
and look,
_Yes, it is over now._
Call to him out of the silence, call him to see
The starling shaking its head as it walks in the
grass--
_Ah, who knows how?_
He cannot see it, I can never show it him, how it
shook--
_Don't disturb him, darling._
--Its head as it walked: I can never call him to me,
Never, he _is_ not, whatever shall come to pass.
_No, look at the wet starling._
IN TROUBLE AND SHAME
I LOOK at the swaling sunset
And wish I could go also
Through the red doors beyond the black-purple bar.
I wish that I could go
Through the red doors where I could put off
My shame like shoes in the porch,
My pain like garments,
And leave my flesh discarded lying
Like luggage of some departed traveller
Gone one knows not where.
Then I would turn round,
And seeing my cast-off body lying like lumber,
I would laugh with joy.
ELEGY
SINCE I lost you, my darling, the sky has come near,
And I am of it, the small sharp stars are quite near,
The white moon going among them like a white bird
among snow-berries,
And the sound of her gently rustling in heaven like
a bird I hear.
And I am willing to come to you now, my dear,
As a pigeon lets itself off from a cathedral dome
To be lost in the haze of the sky, I would like to
come,
And be lost out of sight with you, and be gone like
foam.
For I am tired, my dear, and if I could lift my feet,
My tenacious feet from off the dome of the earth
To fall like a breath within the breathing wind
Where you are lost, what rest, my love, what rest!
GREY EVENING
WHEN you went, how was it you carried with you
My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours?
My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers,
And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue?
Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped
Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields
Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped
And garnered that the golden daylight yields.
Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among
The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk,
As farther off the scythe of night is swung,
And little stars come rolling from their husk.
And all the earth is gone into a dust
Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold,
Covered with aged lichens, pale with must,
And all the sky has withered and gone cold.
And so I sit and scan the book of grey,
Feeling the shadows like a blind man reading,
All fearful lest I find the last words bleeding
With wounds of sunset and the dying day.
FIRELIGHT AND NIGHTFALL
THE darkness steals the forms of all the queens,
But oh, the palms of his two black hands are red,
Inflamed with binding up the sheaves of dead
Hours that were once all glory and all queens.
And I remember all the sunny hours
Of queens in hyacinth and skies of gold,
And morning singing where the woods are scrolled
And diapered above the chaunting flowers.
Here lamps are white like snowdrops in the grass;
The town is like a churchyard, all so still
And grey now night is here; nor will
Another torn red sunset come to pass.
THE MYSTIC BLUE
OUT of the darkness, fretted sometimes in its sleeping,
Jets of sparks in fountains of blue come leaping
To sight, revealing a secret, numberless secrets keeping.
Sometimes the darkness trapped within a wheel
Runs into speed like a dream, the blue of the steel
Showing the rocking darkness now a-reel.
And out of the invisible, streams of bright blue drops
Rain from the showery heavens, and bright blue
crops
Surge from the under-dark to their ladder-tops.
And all the manifold blue and joyous eyes,
The rainbow arching over in the skies,
New sparks of wonder opening in surprise.
All these pure things come foam and spray of the sea
Of Darkness abundant, which shaken mysteriously,
Breaks into dazzle of living, as dolphins that leap
from the sea
Of midnight shake it to fire, so the secret of death
we see.
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