Earth draws her close. How warm
Is lover-earth! Like a sleeping bird
She gives herself, then suddenly
She is a leaf whirled in the storm.
Somewhere in a quiet room, her soul unstirred,
Dead… or sleeping,
Through the blind tumult hears afar
The note of a horn, like a silver thread.
She has given her soul to an echo's keeping.
III
Who knows the mountain where the hunter rides
Winding his horn?
Maura who heard it in her dream
Wakens forlorn,
Too late to catch the tenuous thread
Of silver sound
Which in the troubled, intricate fugue of earth
Is drowned.
IV
Maura cannot follow over the hill,
Her youth is landlocked as a hidden pool
Where thirsty love drinks deep,
A shining pool, where lingers
The colour of an unseen golden sky,
A pool where echoes fall asleep.
But restless fingers
Trouble the waters cool,
Snatch at reflected beauty, and destroy
The mirrored dream. The pool is never still,
And broken echoes die.
V
The silver call has gone, but there is left to her
The gentleness of earth,
The simple mysteries of sleep and death,
Of love and birth.
There are faces hungry for smiles, and starving fingers
Reaching for dreams.
And like a memory are the wind-swept chords of night,
And the wide melody of evening sky
Where gleams
A colour like the echo of a horn.
There is a far hill where winds die,
And over the hill lies music yet unborn.