The Golden Darkness/There Is a Sacred Wonder

THERE IS A SACRED WONDER.

There is a sacred wonder on the earth
 Unknown to happy birds and golden days,
That lingers like a sad delirium
 And cries in hidden ways.

It beats forever beneath the froth of things
 And never sunlit loveliness will wane,
But like some shadow-agony it roams
 With streaming hair of rain.

Over the earth the sacred wonder roams
 Robed in a greyness woven of the sea,
And like a sadness in a woman's eyes,
 It haunts eternally.

It wears the lonely twilight for a cloak
 And often hides its eyes, as sorrow must,
And where its drapery swishes by
 The darkness drifts like dust.

It mourns over wet, glistening roofs like wind,
 Then summons silence from her far hushed place,
And I, who dream beside my shadowed pane,
 Have seen a still, grey face. . . .