Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TELEGRAPH OPERATORS, by M. RAINSFORD HAINES


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TELEGRAPH OPERATORS, by                    
First Line: You sit like silent magicians
Last Line: About your quiet eyes and touched your patient glance with irony.
Subject(s): Labor & Laborers; Telegraph; Work; Workers; Telegrams


You sit like silent magicians.
From serpentine shining threads of silver
You draw, with implacable prophetic fingers,
Sentient secrets from out the dim laboratories
Of star-born destiny
Wherein man's fleeting life-spans are so torturously wrought.

You sit like Chinese images;
But for all that you seem not to see,
You hear -- your ears like tiny dynamos of vivid perfectness
Are alive: They perceive the whispered agonies;
The psychic vibrations; the ebb and flow,
As mate calls to mate; as friend to friend
Cries out for succor from the engulfing darkness
Of relentless separations.

Over mountains and prairies;
Through the wind-tossed arms of moaning forests;
Over calm deserts dedicated to eternal beauty;
Indifferent to the assaults of revengeful thunderbolts;
Unscathed by the liquid fires of azure-hilted lightning scimitars
That score the dark vaults of heaven with transient gleaming frescoes;

Swifter than floating aerial ribbons -- bridal wreaths of the sky --
The winding pennants of the wild geese, drifting fog banks,
And gossamer rifts of gauze-kissed clouds;
Outrunning the wind; out-distancing the multitudinous shafts of fragrant rain;

They come -- millions and millions of heart secrets --
Through unknown lanes of virginal air
Bordered by the maiden star-flowers of heaven
And guarded by the signal fires of Orion and of Arabian-historied Algol!

Your ears touch and hold them --
Your listening fingers perceive them;
They quicken into material life
Under the influence of your pregnant magic; --
Hidden thoughts from the hidden hearts of unknown men and women!
They achieve reality by the chemistry of your art;
In their long flight through the air they have been made real!

Your mask-like faces are calm;
They commit no betrayals of your trust.
Only a shadow from the purple-fringed mantles of mystery
Has cast a tiny cloud from its floating draperies
About your quiet eyes and touched your patient glance with irony.





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