Sword Blades and Poppy Seed | Page 7

be with you, Brother.
The Poet came to a meadow.?Sifted through the grass were daisies,?Open-mouthed, wondering, they gazed at the sun.?The Poet struck them with his cane.?The little heads flew off, and they lay?Dying, open-mouthed and wondering,?On the hard ground.?"They are useless. They are not roses," said the Poet.
Peace be with you, Brother. Go your ways.
The Poet came to a stream.?Purple and blue flags waded in the water;?In among them hopped the speckled frogs;?The wind slid through them, rustling.?The Poet lifted his cane,?And the iris heads fell into the water.?They floated away, torn and drowning.?"Wretched flowers," said the Poet,?"They are not roses."
Peace be with you, Brother. It is your affair.
The Poet came to a garden.?Dahlias ripened against a wall,?Gillyflowers stood up bravely for all their short stature,?And a trumpet-vine covered an arbour?With the red and gold of its blossoms.?Red and gold like the brass notes of trumpets.?The Poet knocked off the stiff heads of the dahlias,?And his cane lopped the gillyflowers at the ground.?Then he severed the trumpet-blossoms from their stems.?Red and gold they lay scattered,?Red and gold, as on a battle field;?Red and gold, prone and dying.?"They were not roses," said the Poet.
Peace be with you, Brother.?But behind you is destruction, and waste places.
The Poet came home at evening,?And in the candle-light?He wiped and polished his cane.?The orange candle flame leaped in the yellow ambers,?And made the jades undulate like green pools.?It played along the bright ebony,?And glowed in the top of cream-coloured ivory.?But these things were dead,?Only the candle-light made them seem to move.?"It is a pity there were no roses," said the Poet.
Peace be with you, Brother. You have chosen your part.
The Coal Picker
He perches in the slime, inert,?Bedaubed with iridescent dirt.?The oil upon the puddles dries?To colours like a peacock's eyes,?And half-submerged tomato-cans?Shine scaly, as leviathans?Oozily crawling through the mud.?The ground is here and there bestud?With lumps of only part-burned coal.?His duty is to glean the whole,?To pick them from the filth, each one,?To hoard them for the hidden sun?Which glows within each fiery core?And waits to be made free once more.?Their sharp and glistening edges cut?His stiffened fingers. Through the smut?Gleam red the wounds which will not shut.?Wet through and shivering he kneels?And digs the slippery coals; like eels?They slide about. His force all spent,?He counts his small accomplishment.?A half-a-dozen clinker-coals?Which still have fire in their souls.?Fire! And in his thought there burns?The topaz fire of votive urns.?He sees it fling from hill to hill,?And still consumed, is burning still.?Higher and higher leaps the flame,?The smoke an ever-shifting frame.?He sees a Spanish Castle old,?With silver steps and paths of gold.?From myrtle bowers comes the plash?Of fountains, and the emerald flash?Of parrots in the orange trees,?Whose blossoms pasture humming bees.?He knows he feeds the urns whose smoke?Bears visions, that his master-stroke?Is out of dirt and misery?To light the fire of poesy.?He sees the glory, yet he knows?That others cannot see his shows.?To them his smoke is sightless, black,?His votive vessels but a pack?Of old discarded shards, his fire?A peddler's; still to him the pyre?Is incensed, an enduring goal!?He sighs and grubs another coal.
Storm-Racked
How should I sing when buffeting salt waves?And stung with bitter surges, in whose might?I toss, a cockleshell? The dreadful night?Marshals its undefeated dark and raves?In brutal madness, reeling over graves?Of vanquished men, long-sunken out of sight,?Sent wailing down to glut the ghoulish sprite?Who haunts foul seaweed forests and their caves.?No parting cloud reveals a watery star,?My cries are washed away upon the wind,?My cramped and blistering hands can find no spar,?My eyes with hope o'erstrained, are growing blind.?But painted on the sky great visions burn,?My voice, oblation from a shattered urn!
Convalescence
From out the dragging vastness of the sea,?Wave-fettered, bound in sinuous, seaweed strands,?He toils toward the rounding beach, and stands?One moment, white and dripping, silently,?Cut like a cameo in lazuli,?Then falls, betrayed by shifting shells, and lands?Prone in the jeering water, and his hands?Clutch for support where no support can be.?So up, and down, and forward, inch by inch,?He gains upon the shore, where poppies glow?And sandflies dance their little lives away.?The sucking waves retard, and tighter clinch?The weeds about him, but the land-winds blow,?And in the sky there blooms the sun of May.
Patience
Be patient with you??When the stooping sky?Leans down upon the hills?And tenderly, as one who soothing stills?An anguish, gathers earth to lie?Embraced and girdled. Do the sun-filled men?Feel patience then?
Be patient with you??When the snow-girt earth?Cracks to let through a spurt?Of sudden green, and from the muddy dirt?A snowdrop leaps, how mark its worth?To eyes frost-hardened, and do weary men?Feel patience then?
Be patient with you??When pain's iron bars?Their rivets tighten, stern?To bend and break their victims; as they turn,?Hopeless, there stand the purple jars?Of night to spill oblivion. Do these men?Feel patience then?
Be patient with you??You! My sun and moon!?My basketful