bloom for unknown eyes
To gaze upon in wistfulness.…
A little while to watch,
And then, together, home.
PHAON IN HADES
To-day the very dead would love his face;
And, loving them, I wish that to their place
Of woe his feet might find awhile the way,
And ease them with perfection for a space.
His beauty is so beautiful to-day.
As, when its freight of dew is blown away,
The grass uprises, so would they uprise,
Those ancient dead, and shake their anguish grey,
Breathing his coolness and his glad surprise
As ‘twere the blow and glittering of day.
Ashine with clinging petals and late tears,
Sweet with aroma of Sicilian green,
I see the dear, dear dead make way and lean
To catch the summer of his mouth, the sheen
Of laughter in those eyes that wisdom fears.
And, ah! Persephone! She hath forgot
The pallor and the poppied heaviness —
Upon her wine-red heart her hand is hot.
If thus the very dead, ’twere sure excess
Of blame, were I to love his beauty less!
GIRGENTI
So many here have struggled, fought the fight!
Life after life so many here have flung
As incense to the gods, that served — for what
Save Cerberus’ toll to nothingness?
Of what avail to them, to us,
Their gaunt resistance and their trust?
Across the clear, sad light of centuries,
Their epitaph reveals what line of comfort?
Those that with lit, courageous eyes opposed
The mean, the merely earth, the less than highest,
Was recompense or special profit theirs?
Did their names less profoundly plumb
The chasms of oblivion
Than theirs that never fought,
But, lightly submissive, spread
The purple for their summer hearts
Within the garden’s cool,
Called for the golden cups, the snowy wine,
The honey-comb, and Aphrodite’s flutes?
To which was happiness the booner comrade?
Sweeter than chaplets hold you sweat and blood!
Than easy pomp, strife and hot tears!
Which likelier served the gods?
Behold the gods of both in ambered death
Of fairy tales and poets’ guile!
Which hold in heritage
Elysian meadows and eternal May?
Poor trade, indeed, hoped immortality
For hot lips and the certain spring!
Ah! but the nobler struggle did bequeath
Impetus, blossom-bearing warmth unto
That blind and mighty impulse to perfection —
The race’s slow, incessant upward surge!
Dreams! dreams! About, about, behold
Their bastard-souled successors,
Legitimate in blood alone!
Here once were millions; gazing hence, one saw
The high-hung walls, the teeming market place,
The colors and the colonnades,
The curving city’s brilliant amplitude.…
There hangs upon that northern crag,
As some dirt-wasp had hovelled there,
The drab inheritor of all that purpose;
Slattern of villages, where sat the lily-crowned!
Golden Girgenti!
Of soft Sicilian cities
Allen Steele
Tamsen Parker
Richard Laymon
Janet Tanner
V. M. Holk
Harryette Mullen
Katherine Rhodes
Holly Rayner
Con Template
Daniel Silva