Poems (Tree)/What Words that Move on Wings in a Long Drift
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WHAT words that move on wings in a long drift
Can waft this silence into weary ears,
And steal into the veins and fingertips
Of restless bodies, like magnificent ships
Proud from the seas that calmly sail through fears,
Mean streets, and miseries, with passage swift.
What words pricked from the stars and shimmering together,
Or swept like little winds through leaves alert,
Can filter through the chinks of bolted doors
Deaf to the clamours knocking without pause,
Steeled with indifference against all hurt,
Deaf to the cry of man, and rack of weather:
To sing the hubbub of this glittering night,
Where all the lamps each with a separate soul
Throb to the ecstasies of dancing life;
And Beauty, gleaming high her magic knife
Cuts free the tethered heart from long control
And flings it like a ball with mad delight
Into the silver lap of the young moon.
What needles quick, what threads, what fingers fine
Can broider tapestries as rich as these,
Stranger than dreams and drifting melodies,
Transparent as the gods we half divine,
Frail as the thoughts that dwindle in a swoon
Ghostly before begetting. Tinged with pain
That glimmers pale on hands we cannot find,
And visioned faces that our dreams create
Born in the land forbidden us of fate
And longed for all our lives . . . What words can bind
Forever Joy, that never comes again!
Can waft this silence into weary ears,
And steal into the veins and fingertips
Of restless bodies, like magnificent ships
Proud from the seas that calmly sail through fears,
Mean streets, and miseries, with passage swift.
What words pricked from the stars and shimmering together,
Or swept like little winds through leaves alert,
Can filter through the chinks of bolted doors
Deaf to the clamours knocking without pause,
Steeled with indifference against all hurt,
Deaf to the cry of man, and rack of weather:
To sing the hubbub of this glittering night,
Where all the lamps each with a separate soul
Throb to the ecstasies of dancing life;
And Beauty, gleaming high her magic knife
Cuts free the tethered heart from long control
And flings it like a ball with mad delight
Into the silver lap of the young moon.
What needles quick, what threads, what fingers fine
Can broider tapestries as rich as these,
Stranger than dreams and drifting melodies,
Transparent as the gods we half divine,
Frail as the thoughts that dwindle in a swoon
Ghostly before begetting. Tinged with pain
That glimmers pale on hands we cannot find,
And visioned faces that our dreams create
Born in the land forbidden us of fate
And longed for all our lives . . . What words can bind
Forever Joy, that never comes again!
1915