Over the broken fence
The moonbeams trail their shrouds;
Their tattered cerements
Cling to the gauzy clouds,
In ribbons frayed and thin—
And startled by the light
Silence shrinks deeper in
The depths of night.
Useless lie spades and rakes;
Rust's on the garden-tools.
Yet, where the moonlight makes
Nebulous silver pools
A ghostly shape is cast—
Something unseen has stirred....
Was it a breeze that passed?
Was it a bird?
Dead roses lift their heads
Out of a grassy tomb;
From ruined pansy-beds
A thousand pansies bloom.
The gate is opened wide—
The garden that has been
Now blossoms like a bride....
Who entered in?
GHOSTS: MADISON CAWEIN
Low, weed-climbed cliffs, o'er which at noon
The sea-mists swoon:
Wind-twisted pines, through which the crow
Goes winging slow:
Dim fields the sower never sows,
Or reaps or mows:
And near the sea a ghostly house of stone
Where all is old and lone.
A garden, falling in decay,
Where statues gray
Peer, broken, out of tangled weed
And thorny seed;
Satyr and Nymph, that once made love
By walk and grove:
And, near a fountain, shattered, green with mould,
A sundial, lichen-old.
Like some sad life bereft,
To musing left,
The house stands: love and youth
Both gone, in sooth:
But still it sits and dreams:
And round it seems
Some memory of the past, still young and fair,
Haunting each crumbling stair.
And suddenly one dimly sees,
Come through the trees,
A woman, like a wild moss-rose:
A man, who goes
Softly: and by the dial
They kiss a while:
Then drowsily the mists blow round them, wan,
And they like ghosts are gone.
THE THREE GHOSTS: THEODOSIA GARRISON