Star over Bethlehem (14 page)

Then, on your grave, a thousand flowers are born,

Wide cups of white

Filled with delight,

Lasting their radiant hour to dawn!

There lies my lover—dead,

A King palm at his head,

Night Cereus at his feet,

The night is all too fleet …

 

T
HE
earth is Beauty and also longing;

Without desire and incompleteness

There is no Beauty.

Only the undreamt dream knows significance,

Only the vision we do not see has essential form;

Beauty is a vision imperfectly seen,

Beauty is the sound our ears hear only partly.

There is a stillness in the heart of sound.

Let me escape into that stillness

Which is Nothing and Everything;

Let me escape from the sharp pain of Beauty

For Beauty is a sword that pierces the heart;

Then shall I be the End and the Beginning,

Then shall I be Myself and Everyone

And also No one.

Beauty will not exist …

Beauty is here and now,

It is not hereafter …

 

T
HE
water flows

Peacefully along …

Under the trees

Like a song

Unsung.

Peacefully the water flows

Under the trees,

Brown water deep and cool,

Like beautiful words

That no one has said.

For the lips that might have spoken them

Are dead,

But the words are there still

In the stream,

Carried along

With the silent song …

Gentle winding stream

Under the trees,

You are like a dream

That might have been dreamt

But the dreamer awoke

Too soon …

The dream is here

In the stream,

Carried along

With the song

And the words

That are too lovely to be said.

The stream ripples and murmurs,

It talks as it flows,

But it is not the stream that I hear,

It is the deep dream and the song and the rhythm of beautiful words.

They are there

Under the trees

Flowing along …

O song,

O words,

O dream,

You do not only
seem,

You are there in the deep reality of final peace.

 

I
N
silence beauty will take form and grow …

In silence, in a dark place will beauty stand

Deathless—eternal—with an outstretched hand.

Soft! Do not frighten her—tread gently—so …

Pile up the lumps of sticky common clay,

Tools of your trade, tools that you understand,

Mould, shape and build with ever-loving hand,

Be swift—be swift—for beauty will not stay.

And at the end? The sculptured stone—who'll buy?

Some rich man, proud of purse and flair;

“Fine piece of work! 'Twill give the place an air.”

How shall he understand your desperate sigh:

Not this, I saw—not this.

On rubbish heap, discarded clay says—Why?

I that once lived for beauty's kiss

And now, discarded, on an ashpit lie.

So why?—I ask—

Why have I lived?

From me was beauty formed.

And now

Oh why—oh why?

 

H
AIR
like a mist and eyes so wide apart and grey

That do not smile

But look far out as though they see

Once in a while

Things that Humanity,

The rank and file,

Shall never glimpse—they are so far away.

There in the crowded street they see

The desert sands and sometimes hear

An endless tune, now far, now near.

The piper pipes. The wandering tune

Floats out and upward to the moon

And stirs the palm trees in the breeze

And stirs the heart that listens yet …

Oh, wandering tune that wakes again

Forgotten longing and dead pain

And will not let the heart forget.

Oh, wandering tune

Beneath the moon,

Now far, now near—

That endless tune

Beneath the moon.

 

S
PEAK
softly, let me sit and, dreaming, see

A golden arch uprising to the skies,

See it so clearly through my closed eyes

That, once again, I stand there quietly …

There, where Men built for glory, there shall be

Only bare beauty left, unheeding, wise,

Scornful of Midget Man who wars and dies,

Who builds and toils and suffers endlessly …

There shall remain at last the crumbling clay,

The loneliness of naked beauty bared,

The wild birds flying forth from sanctuary …

Let me remember one enchanted day …

And all the loveliness of beauty shared.

Speak softly, let me sit and, dreaming, see.

 

G
REEN

Green melons

Round

Oblong

Numbers piled up

Green and round …

Innocent round melons saying nothing,

Nothing at all.

In the corner there are melons gashed and split

With naked pink flesh

And thousands of flies settling on them.

Thousands of flies

Ugh!

God sees the world like a round green melon,

And then he sees the flies

Buzzing and settling …

But, being merciful,

He looks away and says,

“I will try not to think of these human beings …”

Allah is very merciful.

 

I
HAVE
sat dreaming in a quiet place …

The green leaves met above my head,

A river rustled in its bed,

And all around

Was sweet and stealthy woodland sound.

Such was a bower within the wood

To fit a hidden secret mood …

And yet my eyes looked out and saw

Not the dark sweetness of the wood

But far off misty hills of blue

Seen from a hillside where there grew

Genista flowers and Iris white

(Do you remember our delight?)

And from that hillside where we lay

On that thrice blessed halcyon day

We saw—above all mortal ills

The misty everlasting hills …

“I will lift up mine eyes and see—”

And dream that you are there with me.

 

D
O
you remember water like molten silver gleaming?

And white sails that crept slowly past?

Stealthily, silently, as though they knew

They might disturb our sweet enchanted dreaming …

My heart, that night, was silent too

Or did it stir? Stir and awake from its long dreaming?

It was so quiet that I scarcely knew …

I only know next morn the sands were golden

And that day broke for us alone.

It came and brought us joy—and now is gone.

But there remain in that enchanted land

Our footprints in the golden endless sand …

 

I
SHALL
not return again the way I came,

Back to the quiet country where the hills

Are purple in the evenings, and the tors

Are grey and quiet, and the tall standing stones

Lead out across the moorland till they end

At water's edge.

It is too gentle, all that land,

It will bring back

Such quiet dear remembered things,

There, where the longstone lifts its lonely head,

Gaunt, grey, forbidding,

Ageless, however worn away;

There, even, grows the heather …

Tender, kind,

The little streams are busy in the valleys,

The rivers meet by the grey Druid bridge,

So quiet,

So quiet,

Not as death is quiet, but as life can be quiet

When it is sweet.

 

D
O
you remember Lebanon?

The stillness and the snows?

The cool cold glare

And a blue sky—pitiless—

Or sometimes grey and heavy with unfallen snow?

In the summers that were of polished brown hills

(But always the stillness—the mountain tops)

Here Solomon's men came to hew and fell the cedars

And the trees were taken to stand

Proudly in the temple of God …

But they had been nearer to God,

Had lived with God in the hills,

Had whispered to God in the stillness;

They had been proud then and unafraid.

And you, my Cedar tree, in my garden by the Thames,

Brought in a ship and planted in a strange land

Near to the river

With farm lands all around,

Close to the toil and the labour of men,

Stately you grew, your branches wide,

Gracious you stand

With smooth clipped lawn all around you

And an English herbaceous border

Flaunting its bloom on a summer's day.

You are a part of England now:

“Tea will be served on the lawn

Under the Cedar tree.”

But do you remember Lebanon?

Beloved tree—do you remember Lebanon?

 

O
N
Calvary, in midday's burning heat,

What thoughts in Mary's heart, as pale she stands?

What echoed words, remembered words, that beat

From out the past, and make her clench her hands?

Gold, frankincense and myrrh …
The Sages kneel,

And simple shepherds all agog with joy,

With Angels praising God who doth reveal

His love for men in Christ, the newborn boy …

Where now the incense? Where the kingly gold?

For Jesus only bitter myrrh and woe.

Here hangs no kingly figure—just a son

In pain and dying …

How shall Mary know

That with his sigh: “'
Tis finished …
” all is told?

Then
—at
that
moment—Christ's Reign has begun!

 

I
N
the North the snows are falling,

In the North the birds are calling,

But my heart that lives for loving