When we entered the burning city
charred corpses greeted us.
A child’s hand dangled from a scorched tree
and the twisted wreckage of a bus
mocked the stillness of the sky.
Gunner gagged, Ski scratched his head,
neither understanding why
he had to liberate the dead.
The moon is a charring ember
Dying into the dark;
Off in the crouching mountains
Coyotes bark.
The stars are heavy in heaven,
Too great for the sky to hold --
What if they fell and shattered
The earth with gold?
No lights are over the mesa,
The wind is hard and wild,
I stand at the darkened window
And cry like a child.
In troublous days of anguish and rebuke,
While sadly round them Israel's children look,
And their eyes fail for waiting on their Lord:
While underneath each awful arch of green,
On every mountain-top, God's chosen scene,
Of pure heart-worship, Baal is adored:
'Tis well, true hearts should for a time retire
To holy ground, in quiet to aspire
Towards promised regions of serener grace;
On Horeb, with Elijah, let us lie,
Where all around on mountain, sand, and sky,
SEE how the speckled sky burns like a pigeon's throat,
Jewelled with embers of opal and peridote.
See the white river that flashes and scintillates,
Curved like a tusk from the mouth of the city-gates.
Hark, from the minaret, how the muezzin's call
Floats like a battle-flag over the city wall.
From trellised balconies, languid and luminous
Faces gleam, veiled in a splendour voluminous.
Leisurely elephants wind through the winding lanes,
The slender moon in its silvery sheen,
The golden stars with the blue between
Of a dreamy, summer sky;
And still the night winds sigh.
With the silvery moon to whisper to,
And the golden stars to kiss, mid the blue
Of a listening, summer sky,
For what should the night winds sigh?
Oh, unhappy stars! your fate I mourn,
Ye by whom the sea-toss'd sailor's lighted,
Who with radiant beams the heav'ns adorn,
But by gods and men are unrequited:
For ye love not,--ne'er have learnt to love!
Ceaselessly in endless dance ye move,
In the spacious sky your charms displaying,
What far travels ye have hasten'd through,
Since, within my loved one's arms delaying,
I've forgotten you and midnight too!
Love, in this summer night, do you recall
Midnight, and Venice, and those skies of June
Thick-sown with stars, when from the still lagoon
We glided noiseless through the dim canal?
A sense of some belated festival
Hung round us, and our own hearts beat in tune
With passionate memories that the young moon
Lit up on dome and tower and palace wall.
We dreamed what ghosts of vanished loves made part
Of that sweet light and trembling, amorous air.
I felt in those rich beams that kissed your hair,
Hark how the tremulous night-wind is passing in joy-laden sighs;
Soft through my window it comes, like the fanning of pinions angelic,
Whispering to cease from myself, and look out on the infinite skies.
Out on the orb-studded night, and the crescent effulgence of Dian;
Out on the far-gleaming star-dust that marks where the angels have trod;
Out on the gem-pointed Cross, and the glittering pomp of Orion,
Flaming in measureless azure, the coronal jewels of God;
Thistle and darnell and dock grew there,
And a bush, in the corner, of may,
On the orchard wall I used to sprawl
In the blazing heat of the day;
Half asleep and half awake,
While the birds went twittering by,
And nobody there my lone to share
But Nicholas Nye.
Nicholas Nye was lean and gray,
Lame of leg and old,
More than a score of donkey's years
He had been since he was foaled;
He munched the thistles, purple and spiked,
Would sometimes stoop and sigh,
A near horizon whose sharp jags
Cut brutally into a sky
Of leaden heaviness, and crags
Of houses lift their masonry
Ugly and foul, and chimneys lie
And snort, outlined against the gray
Of lowhung cloud. I hear the sigh
The goaded city gives, not day
Nor night can ease her heart, her anguished labours stay.
Below, straight streets, monotonous,
From north and south, from east and west,
Stretch glittering; and luminous
Above, one tower tops the rest
And holds aloft man's constant quest:
