Poems (Piatt)/Volume 2/Leaving Love

by Sarah Piatt

LEAVING LOVE.

If one should stay in Italy a while,
 With bloom to hide the dust beneath her feet,
With birds in love with roses to beguile
 Her life until its sadness grew too sweet;

If she should, slowly, see some statue there,
 Divine with whiteness and with coldness, keep
A very halo in the hovering air;
 If she should weep—because it could not weep;

If she should waste each early gift of grace
 In watching it with rapturous despair,
Should kiss her youth out on its stony face,
 And feel the greyness gathering toward her hair:

Then fancy, though it had till now seemed blind,
 Blind to her little fairness, it could see
How scarred of soul, how wan and worn of mind,
 How faint of form and faded, she must be;

If she should moan: "Ah, land of flower and fruit,
 Ah, fiercely languid land, undo your charm!
Ah, song impassioned, make your music mute!
 Ah, bosom, shake away my clinging arm!"

Then swiftly climb into the mountains near,
 And set her face forever toward the snow,
And feel the North in chasm and cliff, and hear
 No echo from the fairyland below;

If she should feel her own new loneliness,
 With every deep-marked, freezing step she trod,
Nearing (and in its nearness growing less)
 The vast and utter loneliness of God;

If back to scented valleys she should call,
 This woman that I fancy—only she—
Would it remind one statue there at all,
 O cruel Silence in the South, of—me?