BRING YOUR BEAUTY

Bring your beauty, bring your laughter, bring even your fears,
Bring the grief that is, the joy that was in other years,
Bring again the happiness, bring love, bring tears.

There was laughter once, there were grave, happy eyes,
Talk of firm earth, old earth-sweeping mysteries: 
There were great silences under clear dark skies.

Now is silence, now is loneliness complete; all is done. 
The thrush sings at dawn, too sweet, up creeps the sun: 
But all is silent, silent, for all that was is done.

Yet bring beauty and bring laughter, and bring even tears,
And cast them down; strew your happiness and fears,
Then leave them to the darkness of thought and years.

Fears in that darkness die; they have no spring. 
Grief in that darkness is a bird that wants wing.... 
O love, love, your brightness, your beauty bring.

MEMORIAL

The wild October sky
Rises not so high,
The tree’s roots that creep
Into the earth’s body thrust not so deep
As our high and dark thought.

Yet thought need not roam
Far off to bring you home. 
The sky is our wild mind,
Your roots are round our spirits twined,
To ours are your hearts caught.

O, never buried dead! 
The living brain in the head
Is not so quick as you
Burning our conscious darkness through
With brightness past our thought.

THE HUMAN MUSIC

At evening when the aspens rustled soft
And the last blackbird by the hedge-nest laughed,
And through the leaves the moon’s unmeaning face
Looked, and then rose in dark-blue leafless space;
Watching the trees and moon she could not bear
The silence and the presence everywhere. 
The blackbird called the silence and it came
Closing and closing round like smoke round flame. 
Into her heart it crept and the heart was numb,
Even wishes died, and all but fear was dumb—­
Fear and its phantoms.  Then the trees were enlarged,
And from their roundness unguessed shapes emerged,
Or no shape but the image of her fear
Creeping forth from her mind and hovering near. 
If a bat flitted it was an evil thing;
Sadder the trees grew with every shadowy wing—­
Their shape enlarged, their arms quivered, their thought
Stirring in the leaves a silent anguish wrought. 
“What are they thinking of, the evil trees,
Nod-nodding, standing in malignant ease? 
Something against man’s mortal heart was sworn
Once, when their dark Powers were conceived and born;
And in such fading or such lightless hours
The world is delivered to these plotting Powers.” 
No physical swift blow she dreaded, not
Lightning’s quick mercy; but her heart grew hot
And cold and hot with uncomprehended sense