As I went over fossil hill I gathered up small jointed stones, And I remembered the archaic sea Where once these pebbles were my bones. As I walked on the Roman wall The wind blew southward from the pole. Oh I have been that violence hurled Against the ramparts of the world. At nightfall in an empty kirk I felt the fear of all my deaths: Shapes I had seen with animal eyes Crowded the dark with mysteries. I stood beside a tumbling beck Where thistles grew upon a mound That many a day had been my home, Where now my heart rots in the ground. I was the trout that haunts the pool, The shadowy presence of the stream. Of many many lives I leave The scattered bone and broken wing. I was the dying animal Whose cold eye closes on a jagged thorn, Whose carcass soon is choked with moss, Whose skull is hidden by the fern. My footprints sink in shifting sand And barley-fields have drunk my blood, My wisdom traced the spiral of a shell, My labour raised a cairn upon a fell. Far I have come and far must go, In many a grave my sorrow lies, But always from dead fingers grow Flowers that I bless with living eyes. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...YOUNG LINCOLN by EDWIN MARKHAM A PORTRAIT by ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING CHAUCERS WORDES UNTO ADAM, HIS OWN SCRIVEYN by GEOFFREY CHAUCER THE RAGGED WOOD by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH THE QUEEN'S RIDE; AN INVITATION by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH |