H.A.
THE GOOSE CREEK VOICE
This is the low-doored house among funereal trees,
Where one May dusk they brought Louise,
With music slow,
And sobbing low,
The old slaves crooning eerily.
She died asleep and weeping wearily.
She had a poppy-strange disease;
A beauty that was more than carnal,
How durst they leave her in the charnel?
She might be sleeping eerily!
Hush! They have locked her in the tomb,
Among the silences and wilting bloom;
Life's melody of voices drifts away—
Mistaken!
Was it an owlet in the thorns that moaned?
The churchyard moonlight turns ash-gray—
Hush! Pale Louise!
The dead must not awaken.
Something a twittering cry is uttering.
Is that a bird there on her breast,
Lost in the fragrant gloom,
Wakening to morning twilight in the tomb?
No bird—it is her folded hands a-fluttering!
I think I should have died to see her rise
Among the withered wreaths
And spider-cluttered palls
Of her dead uncles' funerals,
While streams of horror fed the blue lakes of her eyes.
I known I would have died to see her rise.
Over the fields a voice calls from the tomb,
Pleading and pleading drearily,
But all the slaves have fled
And left her talking to her coffined dead,
And whimpering eerily.
The young birds die
To see old hands thrust from the window-slit,
Clutching the light in handfuls of despair;
Stark fear has stroked the color from her hair,
While from the window comes
The babbled whisper of her prayer.
Night is like spiders in her mouth;
By day they spin a film across her eyes.
Now night; now day—
The birds come back;
It is another year:
The withering voice they fear
Has nothing more to say.
But yet once more
Her kinsmen came
With nodding plume and pall
And music slow,
And, sobbing low,
They fluttered back the door, and lo!—
She leaned against the slit-window
Her web-like, bony hands against the wall,
And all about her, like a summer cloud
Rippled her leprous hair,
One bleached and shuddering shroud.