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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LAMENT OF GRANITE, by                    
First Line: Rather had we been ground
Last Line: Than granite remembered of man.
Subject(s): Lament; Mills And Millers; Progress; Stones; Granite; Rocks


Rather had we been ground
In the mills of calamity,
Dust unremembered of man;
Rather had we been crossed with base clay
Or blooded with corrupt mortar,
To live forgotten
Behind the hybrid's mask,
Than granite remembered of man.

Before the Talmud, before the Koran,
Before the confusion of the word,
We studied in the books of silence
And were learned in its alphabet;
We dreamed in the quiet earth
And intoned:
"In the beginning was the silence;
All things are but inflections of its voice."

Was it mole or slug or worm
That nibbled earth's axis,
And disturbed the wheel?
The melodious balance?
Or daemon,
Jealous of the wheel's
Day-welling, night-falling rounds,
Who broke the balanced curve of silence

With wash-out of thundered syllable?
We know not what:
Or mole or slug or worm or jealous daemon;
But once so wrenched from quiet
We learned of wind and rain and night's breathing,—
New vocables,—
And these we added to our silence.

Man plucked us from our ancient quarry
With plundering forceps;
Sprinkled us with baptismal sweat
And named us for misfortune.
O, cursed be the mad physician
And his bitter instrument.

We who once were lengths of latitude
Are measured now by parsimony's inch;
Now are we huddled and dwarfed
To make a steeple's frame.
We who once intoned:
"In the beginning was the silence;
All things are but the inflection of its voice,"
Must now bear calumny of cracked bells.

Rather had we been ground
In the mills of calamity,
Forgotten as dust,
Than granite remembered of man.





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