H.A.
THE LEAPING POLL
At early morning when the earth grows cold,
When river mists creep up,
And those asleep are nearest death,
She died.
The feather would not flutter in her breath;
And those who long had watched her slipped away,
Too weary then to weep;
They could do that next day—
They left her lonely on the bed,
Under a long, glistening sheet, in feeble tallow-shine,
Rigid from muffled feet to swathèd head.
This in old days before the Turkish cure
Had driven out the pox;
Next morning, while slave carpenters
Were hammering at the oblong box,
The sun revived her and she breathed again,
Like Lazarus, and in later years grew beautiful,
And was the mother of strong men.
These things her father, master of an ancient place,
Pondered, and read of men in antique times
Who wakened in the charnel from a trance.
Often his eyes would rest on her askance,
And fear grew on him, and strange dreams he had a-bed,
Till waking and asleep he turned his head,
Front-back, front-back, from side to side,
Looking for Death. At last, one night
He heard crisp footfalls in his room,
And stared his soul out in the gloom,
Peering until he died.
But when they broke the seals upon his will,
They found each codicil and long bequest
Was held in trust until
The heirs should carry out his last request—
To burn his body (naming witnesses);
And they, all eagerness to share,
Prepared to carry out this strange behest.
A pile of lightwood on the river bank,
Neighbors on horseback, and the slaves,
With teeth as white as eyeballs, rank on rank,
Watched on the pyre the form wrapped in a shroud,
Lonely among the lolling tongues of flames—
The smoke streamed, trailing in a saffron cloud,
The greedy noise of fire grew loud,
Then, "whiff," the shroud burned with a flare:
The dead man's eyes looked down
Like china moons upon the crowd.
They saw him slowly shake his head,
The thing denied that it was dead,
While from the blacks arose a babblement of prayer.