Classic Poem

( To my Collie )

Darkness hangs many veils
Between waking and sleeping,
Some most beautiful, others terrible;
One by one they unfurl,
Drifting downward
In delicate folds, at first elusively diapered,
Burning later to clearness
Of moving forms
Diverse and myriad.
None can tell what manner of veil fair or horrible
Darkness will choose as the last
To close him in from waking.

Most of all do I dread the curtain of wavy crimson
Broidered with terrible jewels,
Jewels of eyes unsocketed
Patterned by twos and twos on the gauze of Darkness,
Eyes of helpless creatures that lived and died in bewilderment
In a dim confusion of patience
Having endured to the utmost man's bitter injustice
Without bitterness.

Eyes of nightingales blinded with red-hot needles
That for their torturers
They might sing more sweetly;
Eyes of half-starved horses
Flogged to death because of their weakness
By the man who starved them;
Eyes of desert creatures,
Of crag-born eagles
Dying of fierce nostalgia
In iron cages:
Eyes that belonged to pitiful, cringing bodies
Shredded while sentient,
Nerve by nerve, with bright, inquisitive scalpels
In eager hands of the self-same substance,
In hands of flesh threaded also with nerves.

O terrible, terrible almost beyond endurance
Are the jewels of darkness,
The jewels of eyes ever asking, asking,
In patient bewilderment
For the answer that no one knows.
All the night that is past
Their mournful, submissive questioning
Troubled my heart to anguish ...
So that I turned my own eyes away from them
Looking toward God,
That God by Christians and Jews called Jahweh,
By Mahomedans Allah,
But I knew that my look toward him
Was one with their look toward me, —
That he would not answer:
And horror stiffened my heart,
Horror of God, of this God and his immemorial indifference,
His Omnipotent self-complacency.

And I cried aloud in unbelief and rebellion,
" It cannot be that there is that one God only,
Dwelling in calm aloofness,
Creator of endless suffering,
Bland and scathless tormentor of all things living.
It is not enough, no! it is not enough
That once as Man he descended,
Once only,
To share in the pangs that all flesh is forever enduring.
One God cannot atone by one Cross only,
For all the anguish of beast and man through the ages,
Through ages past and to come!
Oh, that some younger, humaner God would answer me. "

Then from the smother of silence
Laughter jetted,
Clear and chill as a spurt of April water
Shot from a shadowy fountain into sunlight;
Into my dream he flashed with it,
Radiant, beautiful, adolescent,
A boy god shaken with mirth celestial,
Divinely heartless.
" O little Mortal, " his words came broken with merriment,
" Answer me first this thing,
Then you may question me;
Why, since men who are verily gods to the beasts
Show them no mercy,
Should we the gods above men
Show men compassion? "

But I could not answer him this
And awoke weeping.