A Pauper

. . . and the children's teeth shall be set on edge.

I see him old, trapped in a burly house

Cold in the angry spitting of a rain

Come down these sixty years.

                                  Why vehemently

Astride the threshold do I wait, marking

The ice softly pendent on his broken temple?

Upon the silence I cast the mesh of rancor

By which the gentler convergences of the flesh

Scatter untokened, mercilessly estopped.

Why so illegal these tears?

The years' incertitude and

The dirty white fates trickling

Blackly down the necessary years

Define no attitude to the present winter,

No mood to the cold matter.

(I remember my mother, my mother,

A stiff wind halted outside,

In the hard ear my country

Was a far shore crying

With invisible seas)

When tomorrow pleads the mortal decision

Sifting rankly out of time's sieve today,

No words differently will be uttered

Nor stuttered, like sheep astray.

A pauper in the swift denominating

Of a bald cliff with a proper name, having words

As strumpets only, I cannot beat off

Invincible modes of the sea, hearing:

Be a man my son by God.

                                  He turned again

To the purring jet yellowing the murder story,

Deaf to the pathos circling in the air.