WHEN you went, how was it you
carried with you
My
missal book of fine, flamboyant hours?
My book of turrets and of red-thorn
bowers,
And skies of
gold, and ladies in bright tissue?
Now underneath a blue-grey twilight,
heaped
Beyond the
withering snow of the shorn fields
Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is
reaped
And garnered
that the golden daylight yields.
Dim lamps like yellow poppies
glimmer among
The
shadowy stubble of the under-dusk,
As farther off the scythe of night is
swung,
And little
stars come rolling from their husk.
And all the earth is gone into a
dust
Of greyness
mingled with a fume of gold,
Covered with aged lichens, pale with
must,
And all the
sky has withered and gone cold.
And so I sit and scan the book of
grey,
Feeling the
shadows like a blind man reading,
All fearful lest I find the last words
bleeding
With wounds
of sunset and the dying day.