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Sara Teasdale
I sang a song at dusking time
Beneath the evening star,
And Terence left his latest rhyme
To answer from afar.
Pierrot laid down his lute to weep,
And sighed, "She sings for me."
But Colin slept a careless sleep
Beneath an apple tree.
My apple trees have blossomed in a night,
And pale green moonlight bathes their rose and white
With a strange wine that makes the pulses throb.
A sleepy robin now mistakes the light,
And his soft doubting note sounds like a sob
Voicing the thought that draws my heart-strings tight.
What Life could give you is not yours to take
Nor mine to give--and yet to-night I wake
Remembering your giving. But the note
Of that moon-haunted robin must not shake
My calm belief that you--austere, remote--
Need nothing I can ever mar or make.
Once there was a cabin here, and once there was a man;
And something happened here before my memory began.
Time has made the two of them the fuel of one flame
And all we have of them is now a legend and a name.
All I have to say is what an old man said to me,
And that would seem to be as much as there will ever be.
"Fifty years ago it was we found it where it sat."--
And forty years ago it was old Archibald said that.
"An apple tree that's yet alive saw something, I suppose,
Of what it was that happened there, and what no mortal knows.
Some one on the mountain heard far off a master shriek,
And then there was a light that showed the way for men to seek.