CHILDREN

CHILDREN, ye have not lived, to you it seems


Life is a lovely stalactite of dreams,

Or carnival of careless joys that leap

About your hearts like billows on the deep

In flames of amber and of amethyst.





Children, ye have not lived, ye but exist

Till some resistless hour shall rise and move

Your hearts to wake and hunger after love,

And thirst with passionate longing for the things

That burn your brows with blood-red sufferings.





Till ye have battled with great grief and fears,

And borne the conflict of dream-shattering ye

I live on.

He wakes, who never thought to wake again,


Who held the end was Death. He opens eyes

Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain

Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens. He lies;

And waits; and once in timeless sick surmise

Through the dead air heaves up an unknown hand,

Like a dry branch. No life is in that land,

Himself not lives, but is a thing that cries;

An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck

Of moveless horror; an Immortal One

Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly

Fast-stuck in grey sweat on a corpse's neck.



I thought when love for you died, I should die.

It's dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on.