Page:Poems by Isaac Rosenberg (1922).djvu/77

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MOSES

Throb with a wilder pulse:
No delicate flame shall quail
With terror at your convulse.
Thin branches whip the white skies
To lips and spaces of song
That chant a mood to my eyes....
Ah! Sleep can be overlong.

Moses

Voices thunder, voices of deeds not done:
Lo, on the air are scrawled in abysmal light
Old myths never known and yet already forgone,
And songs more lost, more secret than desert light :
Martyrdoms of uncreated things,
Virgin silences waiting a breaking voice—
As in a womb they cry, in a cage beat vain wings
Under life, over life: is their unbeing my choice ?

Dull wine of torpor—the unsoldered spirit lies limp.
Ah! If she would run into a mould,
Some new idea unwalled
To human by-ways, an apocalyptic camp
Of utterest and ulterior dreaming,
Understood only in its gleaming,
To flash stark naked the whole girth of the world.

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