The Collected Poems of Dora Sigerson Shorter/Near the Forum of Trajan
NEAR THE FORUM OF TRAJAN
In Rome, as I look from my lattice
And lean to the night,
Where the living sleep, still as the dead are,
All in the sunlight.
The dead are awake 'mid our resting
Beneath the pale moon.
I arise and will walk with their numbers.
Dawn rises so soon.
I hear the bell voices together
Crash into strange sound—
“I, Trajan, am cold”; “I, Aurelius,
Lie stiff in the ground.”
“Grey Cassius sleeps long, and grim Brutus,
Proud Caesar is dead”;
Thus the voices of time in their singing
Roll over my head.
O spirits that throng me and whisper
In desolate street,
O souls that so follow and mock me,
You laugh and repeat:—
“Who is he who shouts into the silence
More lone than us dead,
Who says he would walk with our numbers
With echoing tread?
“Who would join in a world so immortal
Yet touches no hand.
Why comes he, the child of the sunlight.
To our haunted land?
“Would he know of our power and ambition,
The worth of it all?
Let him seek the gold palace of Nero,
And read on its wall.
“Let him look for our loves and desires
In the palace of Kings,
Then bid him go hence with his living
That tortures and stings.
“He is the ghost that would haunt us
With dreams of past light;
Drive him back to his kind in the sunshine.
And leave us the night.”