Obsequial Ode
SURELY you've trodden straight
To the very door!
Surely you took your fate
Faultlessly. Now it's too late
To say more.
It is evident you were right,
That man has a course to go
A voyage to sail beyond the charted seas.
You have passed from out of sight
And my questions blow
Back from the straight horizon that ends all one sees.
Now like a vessel in port
You unlade your riches unto death,
And glad are the eager dead to receive you there.
Let the dead sort
Your cargo out, breath from breath
Let them disencumber your bounty, let them all share.
I imagine dead hands are brighter,
Their fingers in sunset shine
With jewels of passion once broken through you as a
prism
Breaks light into jewels; and dead breasts whiter
For your wrath; and yes, I opine
They anoint their brows with your blood, as a perfect
chrism.
On your body, the beaten anvil,
Was hammered out
That moon-like sword the ascendant dead unsheathe
Against us; sword that no man will
Put to rout;
Sword that severs the question from us who breathe.
Surely you've trodden straight
To the very door.
You have surely achieved your fate;
And the perfect dead are elate
To have won once more.
Now to the dead you are giving
Your last allegiance.
But what of us who are living
And fearful yet of believing
In your pitiless legions.
Shades
SHALL I tell you, then, how it is?—
There came a cloven gleam
Like a tongue of darkened flame
To flicker in me.
And so I seem
To have you still the same
In one world with me.
In the flicker of a flower,
In a worm that is blind, yet strives,
In a mouse that pauses to listen
Glimmers our
Shadow; yet it deprives
Them none of their glisten.
In every shaken morsel
I see our shadow tremble
As if it rippled from out of us hand in hand.
As if it were part and parcel,
One shadow, and we need not dissemble
Our darkness: do you understand?
For I have told you plainly how it is.
Bread Upon The Waters
SO you are lost to me!
Ah you, you ear of corn straight lying,
What food is this for the darkly flying
Fowls of the Afterwards!
White bread afloat on the waters,
Cast out by the hand that scatters
Food untowards,
Will you come back when the tide turns?
After many days? My heart yearns
To know.
Will you return after many days
To say your say as a traveller says,
More marvel than woe?
Drift then, for the sightless birds
And the fish in shadow-waved herds
To approach you.
Drift then, bread cast out;
Drift, lest I fall in doubt,
And reproach you.
For you are lost to me!
Ruination
THE sun is bleeding its fires upon the mist
That huddles in grey heaps coiling and holding back.
Like cliffs abutting in shadow a drear grey sea
Some street-ends thrust forward their stack.
On the misty waste-lands, away from the flushing grey
Of the morning the elms are loftily dimmed, and tall
As if moving in air towards us, tall angels
Of darkness advancing steadily over us all.
Rondeau Of A Conscientious
OBJECTOR.
THE hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous sands
And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the West.
I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands;
To-morrow will pour them all back, the dull hours I detest.
I force my cart through the sodden filth that is pressed
Into ooze, and the sombre dirt spouts up at my hands
As I make my way in twilight now to rest.
The hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous sands.
A twisted thorn-tree still in the evening stands
Defending the memory of leaves and the happy round nest.
But mud has flooded the homes of these weary lands
And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the West.
All day has the clank of iron on iron distressed