Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SALEM, CONDITA 1626, by H. C. GAUSS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SALEM, CONDITA 1626, by                    
First Line: So you visited salem
Last Line: It crumbles.
Subject(s): Salem, Massachusetts


So you visited Salem?
And you saw the Witch House
And Gallows Hill?
And the House of Seven Gables,
And Hawthorne's birthplace?
But you did not see Salem.
How could you?
It has been shut up in my heart for forty years.
I think I was the last who saw it.

How could you see Salem?
You never lived with maiden aunts
Who remembered better days
And nothing else.
You never went to school
Next a graveyard
To a grim old dame who
Denounced youth and pleasure
With savage Scripture readings.

You never peeped, with splendid awe,
Beneath closed blinds
To see wraiths of women
Nursing life-long grudges or heart pangs
Shut in from the light of day.
You never ran away
To sit for hours with gray men
Who talked of Hong-Kong and Sumatra
Of Singapore and Java
As one talks of the corner grocery
Or the cobbler next street.
You never had idle ships and wharves
And empty granite warehouses
For playgrounds
Nor roamed through great
Three-story houses with infinite rooms,
All full of dust of the departed
Where even the mice were venerable.

All this I did, and
I can see Salem.
I would like to show it to you,
But if I touch it,
It crumbles.





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