SWIFT away the century flies, Time has yet the wind for wings, In the past the midnight lies; But my morning never springs. Who goes there? come, ghost or man, You were with us, you will know; Let us commune, there's no ban On speech for us if we speak low. Time has healed the wound, they say, Gone's the weeping and the rain; Yet you and I suspect, the day Will never be the same again. Is it day? I thought there crept Some frightened pale rays through the fog, And where the lank black ash-trees wept I thought the birds were just agog. But no, this fiction died before The swirling gloom, as soon as seen; The thunder's brow, the thunder's roar, Darkness that's felt strode swift between. O euphrasy for ruined eyes! I chose, it seemed, a flowering thorn; The white blooms were but brazen lies, The tree I looked upon was torn In snarling lunacy of pain, A brown charred trunk that deadly cowered, And when I stared across the plain Where once the gladdening green hill towered, It shone a second, then the greed Of death had fouled it; dark it stood, A hump of wilderness untreed Where the kind Dove would never brood. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A LITTLE WHILE by SARA TEASDALE WEIGHING THE BABY by ETHEL LYNN BEERS KEEPERS OF THE SUN by DOROTHY P. ALBAUGH SONNETS OF MANHOOD: 8. THEE by GEORGE BARLOW (1847-1913) THE WASHINGTON BICENTENNIAL by CLARA BECK PUCK'S SWEETHEART by WILLIAM ROSE BENET |