GHOSTS GATHERING
You hear no bones click, see no shaken shroud.
Though no tombs grin, you feel ghosts gathering. Crowd
On pitiful crowd of small dead singing men
Tread the sure earth they feebly hymned; again
With fleshless hand seize unswayed grass. They seize
Insensitive flowers which bend not. Through gross trees
They sift. Nothing withstands them. Nothing knows
Them nor the songs they sang, their busy woes.
‘Hence from these ingrate things! To the towns!’ they weep,
(If ghosts have tears). You think a wrinkled heap
Of leaves heaved, or a wing stirred, less than this.
Some chance on the midnight cities. Others miss
The few faint lights, thin voices. Wretched these
Doomed to beat long the windy vacancies!
Some mourn through forlorn towns. They prowl and seek
—What seek they? Who knows them? If branches creak
And leaves flap and slow women ply their trade,
Those all are living things, but these are dead,
All that they were, dead totally. What fool still
Knows their extinguished songs? They had their fill
Of average joys and sorrows. They learned how
Love wilts, Death does not wilt. What more left now?
But one ghost yet of all these ghosts may find
Himself not utterly faded.
Through his blind
Some old man’s lamp-rays probe the darkness. Sick
Of his gaunt quest, the ghost halts. The clock’s tick
Troubles the silence. Tiredly the ghost scans
The opened book on the table. A flame fans,
A weak wan fire floods through his subtle veins.
No, no, not wholly forgotten! Loves and pains
Not suffered wholly for nothing!
(The old man bends
Over the book, makes notes for pious ends,
—Some curious futile work twelve men at most
Will read and yawn over.) The dizzy ghost,
Like some more ignorant moth circles the light...
Not suffered wholly for nothing!... ‘A sweet night!’
The old man mumbles.... A warmth is in the air,
He smiles, not knowing why. He moves his chair
Closer against the table. And sitting bowed
Lovingly turns the leaves and chants aloud.