A Postcard From The Volcano
- Children picking up our bones
- Will never know that these were once
- As quick as foxes on the hill;
-
- And that in autumn, when the grapes
- Made sharp air sharper by their smell
- These had a being, breathing frost;
-
- And least will guess that with our bones
- We left much more, left what still is
- The look of things, left what we felt
-
- At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
- Above the shuttered mansion-house,
- Beyond our gate and the windy sky
-
- Cries out a literate despair.
- We knew for long the mansion's look
- And what we said of it became
-
- A part of what it is... Children,
- Still weaving budded aureoles,
- Will speak our speech and never know,
-
- Will say of the mansion that it seems
- As if he that lived there left behind
- A spirit storming in blank walls,
-
- A dirty house in a gutted world,
- A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
- Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
From Harmonium, 1923.
- --oOo-- -