Classic Poem

You who have seen years of seasons,
You who have seen mystery dissolve in mystery and experience refuted by experience,
You weeping mothers and fathers who have vainly hurled your will against the prevailing will of death,
You who have visioned a passage way from orb to orb through all the abysses of space,
You who have known that in the harvest was the best seedtime,
You who have seen that nothing is ever lost by the way and that nothing seen or unseen is dishonored by disuse,
You it is I address, you know my voice.

I am bared to the airs,
I me behold the stript tree,
The autumn come and gone, its denuding caresses leaving no garland or sign of the spring summer fertilities departed:
To one who looks I am only reminiscence,
To one who looks, brother of that other, I am glowing prophecy —
To myself I am both and I am present hidden life:
I cover myself with ice and snow, I sleep, I wait my waking,
In my sap the courage to break a way to the spring.

Because there are beginnings and endings, therefore nothing begins and nothing ends,
Because the seed must precede the life that comes from the seed, therefore rotation is never interrupted,
Because worlds come from worlds again, and suns must light other suns, and orbits of planets grant other orbits their laws, therefore continuity is the seal of the covenant.

No one place delays, nowhere in life or death is the impetuous spirit paced to a still stream, one opportunity but opens another, sympathy manifolds itself in countless emanations,
The lords god prevalent, the lords god transfusing love,
In all time beginning nothing, ending nothing.