Requiem 1
Pour out your light, O stars, and do not hold
Your loveliest shining from earth’s outworn shell--
Pure and cold your radiance, pure and cold
My dead friend’s face as well.
Poems on the topic: stars
Poems on the topic “stars” on Poets.by.
Communion
Beauty lies so deep
On all the fields,
Nothing for the eyes
But blessing yields.
Tall elms, greedy of light,
Stand tip-toe. See
The last light linger in
Their tracery.
The guns are dumb, are still
All evil noises.
The singing heart in peace
Softly rejoices,
Only unsatisfied
With Beauty’s hunger
And sacramental thirst--
Nothing of anger.
Bach and the Sentry
Watching the dark my spirit rose in flood
On that most dearest Prelude of my delight.
The low-lying mist lifted its hood,
The October stars showed nobly in clear night.
When I return, and to real music-making,
And play that Prelude, how will it happen then?
Shall I feel as I felt, a sentry hardly waking,
With a dull sense of No Man’s Land again?
At Sunset
From green to gold, from gold to amethyst,
Transmuted by the sun's last lingering ray,
The tranquil hills in dreaming silence lay,
Wrought to a beauty eye could not resist;
Till, folded in with veils of purple mist
That slowly wrapt them from reluctant day,
They mingled with the dusk and flowed away,
Renewing with the stars their nightly tryst.
And as the soft enchantments round us spread,
And twilight with its pensive shadows fell —
Loosed from the prison-wards of care and dread,
Lured from our selfish griefs by beauty's spell —
Along dim thoroughfares our thoughts were led
To haunts of peace where love and silence dwell.
Captive
My spirit is a captive bird
That beats against its cage all day,
Until its winging strength is whirred
Vainly away.
My spirit learns its impotence
Only when night has blurred its bars.
Wings seem a strange impertinence
Before the stars.
Resolution
With but one life full certified,
And that of every gleam denied
My portion,
Close to the unrelenting sod.
E'en as my fathers dumbly trod,
I've slumbered;
But now a surging, wild unrest
Uproots the poppies from my breast,
My soul awake, erect! anew!
I stand and face the star-swept blue,
And swear to make my dreams come true!
Poet in the Basement
Only to tell your loveliness — this love :
Only to tell
Pain's odor, beauty-burning miracle
Of my surrender !
Late I flew . . .
But ever arrow-straight
I fly now from the shade that falls — that fell
Lightly on you,
On me with a wave's weight.
Oh, I must go : this city has a spell
I never gave it leave to have. Still, still to tell
The weaving of your footsteps on the stairs
With my slow-dropping love for you that wears
Cold stone I want my heart for — still I stay.
Put out the stars. Give me another day
Only to tell.
The Old Gods
Old gods are dead; their broken shrines are lying
Profaned with blood and trampled to the ground;
I see lost beauty with each sunset dying,
I hear lost music in each echoing sound.
Old gods are dead; triumphant stands the scoffer
Beside old altars where our offerings lay,--
False gods perhaps,--but what have you to offer
Who batter down old temples in a day?
Old gods are dead; but still the sunset lingers,
The moonlight still its store of treasure yields,
Dawn touches darkness with its magic fingers,
And bluebirds wing their flight across green fields,
The sea-tides ebb and flow, stars shine above,
And human hearts still long for human love.
Evening in England
From its blue vase the rose of evening drops.
Upon the streams its petals float away.
The hills all blue with distance hide their tops
In the dim silence falling on the grey.
A little wind said "Hush!" and shook a spray
Heavy with May's white crop of opening bloom,
A silent bat went dipping up the gloom.
Night tells her rosary of stars full soon,
They drop from out her dark hand to her knees.
Upon a silhouette of woods the moon
Leans on one horn as if beseeching ease
From all her changes which have stirred the seas.
Across the ears of Toil Rest throws her veil,
I and a marsh bird only make a wail.
August Night
We had to wait for the heat to pass,
And I was lying on the grass,
While Mother sat outside the door,
And I saw how many stars there were.
Beyond the tree, beyond the air,
And more and more were always there.
So many that I think they must
Be sprinkled on the sky like dust.
A dust is coming through the sky!
And I felt myself begin to cry.
So many of them and so small,
Suppose I cannot know them all.
The Pilot
From the Past and Unavailing
Out of cloudland we are steering;
After groping, after fearing,
Into starlight we come trailing,
And we find the stars are true.
Still, O comrade, what of you?
You are gone, but we are sailing,
And the old ways are all new.
For the Lost and Unreturning
We have drifted, we have waited;
Uncommanded and unrated,
We have tossed and wandered, yearning
For a charm that comes no more
From the old lights by the shore:
We have shamed ourselves in learning
What you knew so long before.
Alfonso Churchill
They laughed at me as “Prof. Moon,”
As a boy in Spoon River, born with the thirst
Of knowing about the stars.
They jeered when I spoke of the lunar mountains,
And the thrilling heat and cold,
And the ebon valleys by silver peaks,
And Spica quadrillions of miles away,
And the littleness of man.
But now that my grave is honored, friends,
Let it not be because I taught
The lore of the stars in Knox College,
But rather for this: that through the stars
I preached the greatness of man,
Who is none the less a part of the scheme of things
For the distance of Spica or the Spiral Nebulae;
Nor any the less a part of the question
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