You flow, you do not understand,
The spring has eked you out of the earth.
You fell from the storm, you barely coalesce
Before the journey begins.
A gust of wind from a cloud’s dead eye
Blows you onto the clay of the north.
A pond, where the spawn of a million frogs
Grope in the steam of batrachian suns.
At the end, a hesitant stream.
Gentle, the grass barely parts in your path.
By noon, you lay blind in the sun’s deep maw.
You fear you are the plaything of the world,
A god whose cruelty is your solitude.
You flow, you do not understand,
You cannot feel your strength.
The folly of your winding way.
Dust,
Through which
Proud blood
Once flowed.
Dust,
Where a civilization
Flourished.
Dust,
The Valley of the Nile,
Dust,
You proud ones, proud of the skill
With which you play this game--Civilization;
Do not forget that it is a very old game.
Men used to play it on the banks
Of the Tigris and the Euphrates
When the world was a wilderness.
When Susan's work was done she'd sit,
With one fat guttering candle lit,
And window opened wide to win
The sweet night air to enter in;
There, with a thumb to keep her place
She'd read, with stern and wrinkled face,
Her mild eyes gliding very slow
Across the letters to and fro,
While wagged the guttering candle flame
In the wind that through the window came.
And sometimes in the silence she
Would mumble a sentence audibly,
Or shake her head as if to say,
'You silly souls, to act this way!'
And never a sound from night I'd hear,
Unless some far-off cock crowed clear;
O strange devices that alone divide
The seër from the seen--
The very highway of earth's pomp and pride
That lies between
The traveller and the cheating, sweet delight
Of where he longs to be,
But which, bound hand and foot, he, close on night,
Can only see.
The sun I worship,
Not for the light, but for the shadows of the trees he draws :
O shadows welcome like an angel's bower,
Where I build Summer-day dreams !
Not for her love, but for the love's memory,
The woman I adore :
Love may die, but not the memory eternally green—
The well where I drink Spring ecstasy.
To a bird's song I listen,
Not for the voice, but for the silence following after the song :
O Silence fresh from the bosom of voice ! —
Melody from the Death-Land whither my face does ever turn!
Yellow chrysanthemum, white chrysanthemum
Why, the other names for me
Are of no use.
To-day, at last to-day,
I grew to wish to raise
The chrysanthemum flowers.
The far-away sky,
The white billow in distance,
And the expanse of Life and World.
Speak not again, Voice!
The silence washes off sins
Come not again, Light!
Song of sea in rain,
Voice of the sky, earth and men!
List, song of my heart.
The silence-leaves fallen from Life,
Older than dream or pain, —
Are they my passing ghost?
I, a moth with no sense of the day,
Dare not fly,
Lest the silence be marred.