Connaght, a `caoine'
Croon for me;
Lienster, a mean
Stone for me!
~O God that I
May arise with the Gael
To the song in the sky
Over Inisfail!~
Omnium Exeunt in Mysterium. [George Sterling]
The stranger in my gates — lo! that am I,
And what my land of birth I do not know,
Nor yet the hidden land to which I go.
One may be lord of many ere he die,
And tell of many sorrows in one sigh,
But know himself he shall not, nor his woe,
Nor to what sea the tears of wisdom flow;
Nor why one star is taken from the sky.
An urging is upon him evermore,
And though he bide, his soul is wanderer,
Scanning the shadows with a sense of haste —
Where fade the tracks of all who went before:
A dim and solitary traveller
On ways that end in evening and the waste.
Moth-Terror. [Benjamin De Casseres]
I have killed the moth flying around my night-light; wingless and dead it lies upon the floor. (O who will kill the great Time-Moth that eats holes in my soul and that burrows in and through my secretest veils!) My will against its will, and no more will it fly at my night-light or be hidden behind the curtains that swing in the winds. (But O who will shatter the Change-Moth that leaves me in rags — tattered old tapestries that swing in the winds that blow out of Chaos!) Night-Moth, Change-Moth, Time-Moth, eaters of dreams and of me!
Old Age. [Cale Young Rice]
I have heard the wild geese,
I have seen the leaves fall,
There was frost last night
On the garden wall.
It is gone to-day
And I hear the wind call.
The wind? . . . That is all.
If the swallow will light
When the evening is near;
If the crane will not scream
Like a soul in fear;
I will think no more
Of the dying year,
And the wind, its seer.
Atropos. [John Myers O'Hara]