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Page 3
Tomorrow when the hills are washed with fire,
Your door ajar against the flashing East,--
O fling it wide.
PARIS, 1919
III - MONTMARTRE
A rocky hill above the town,
Grey as the soul of silence,
Except where two white strutting domes
Stand aloof and frown
On the huddled homes
Of world-wept love and pain,--
They do not heed that tall disdain,
But sleep, grey, under the stars and the rain.
A woman, young, but old in love,
Carried her child across the square;
Her face was a dim drifting flame
To which her pyre of hair
Was a column of golden smoke.
Her eyes half told the secrets of
Gay sins that no regret defiled;
There her heart broke
In the little question between her eyes.
Hearing the trees in the square she smiled,
And sang to the child.
So passed by in the narrow street
That climbs the steep rock over the town,
Love and the west wind in the stars;
The wind and the sound of those lagging feet
Died like forgotten tears.
I waited till the stars went down,
And I wrote these lines on a cloud to greet
The dawn on the crystal stairs.
PARIS, 1919
IV - A LETTER
Dear boy, what can this stranger mean to you,
Blown to your country by unbridled chance?
That he should drink the morn's first cup of dew
Fresh from the spring, and quicken that grave glance
Wherein as rising tides on hazy shores
Rise the new flames and colours of romance?
Ah, wise and young, the world shall use your youth
And fling you shorn of beauty to despair,
The sum of all that fascinating truth
That you have gleaned, hands tangled in brown hair,
Eyes straining into contemplative fires,--
This truth shall not seem truth when trees are bare.
The hunger of the soul, the watcher left
To brood the nearness of his own decay,
Dully remarking the slow shameless theft
Of the old holiness from day to day,
How youth grows tarnished, wisdom changes false,--
Till one bends near to steal your life away.
Yet who am I to turn aside the hand
Outstretched so friendly and so humbly proud,
Heaped up with beauty from the sunrise land
Of hearts adventurous and heads unbowed?
Only, look not at me with changing eyes
When we must separate amid the crowd.
TOURS, 1918
V - ESTHER DANCING
Speak not nor stir. Here music is alive,
Woven from those swift fingers, strong and light,
Marching across those singing hands, or shed
Slowly, like echoes down the muffled night,
Or beautifully translated, note by note,
Some fainter voice, rhapsodic and remote,
Or shaken out in melodies that dive
Clear into fathoms of profounder things,
Then suddenly again on rising wings,
Burst into sun and hover overhead.
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