TO TIME
O Time, you are an idiot’s fluid curse.
O Time, you are an uninspired hearse.
O Time, you kill beneath your robe of nurse.
O Time, your eyes are cherubs drowned in pools,
O Time, your wisdom scorns the aid of stools,
O Time, your kindness blinds the life of fools.
O Time, you blur pretentious intellect.
O Time, you break the thrones that thoughts erect.
O Time, your hands indifferently correct
The incoherent sorceries of men
Who dance before a monstrous Axe and Pen,
Waving the fetiches of words, and then
Censure the dance with pedestals of gauze
Cleverly imitating rock, and laws
Whose opaque sureness broods above their cause.
When irony will cease to be obscure
To men whose eyes resent the cloudy lure
That ends their tiny clarities, with pure
And forming mists of words, then men will climb
With restless regularity, like Time,
Who merely seeks a changing pantomime.
O Time, you are too pure and swiftly wide
For men who try to check your colored stride
With opaque temples and a sleeping bride.