The Man with the Hoe, and Other Poems (Markham, Pyle, 1900)/The Flying Mist
The Flying Mist
I watch afar the moving Mystery,
The wool-shod, formless terror of the sea—
The Mystery whose lightest touch can change
The world God made to phantasy, death-strange.
Under its spell all things grow old and gray
As they will be beyond the Judgment Day.
All voices, at the lifting of some hand,
Seem calling to us from another land.
Is it the still Power of the Sepulcher
That makes all things the wraiths of things that were?
It touches, one by one, the wayside posts,
And they are gone, a line of hurrying ghosts.
It creeps upon the towns with stealthy feet,
And men are phantoms on a phantom street.
It strikes the towers and they are shafts of air,
Above the spectres passing in the square.
The city turns to ashes, spire by spire;
The mountains perish with their peaks afire.
The fading city and the falling sky
Are swallowed in one doom without a cry.
It tracks the traveler fleeing with the gale,
Fleeing toward home and friends without avail;
It springs upon him and he is a ghost,
A blurred shape moving on a soundless coast.
God! it pursues my love along the stream,
Swirls round her and she is forever dream.
What Hate has touched the universe with eld,
And left me only in a world dispelled?