From 'Lines In Memory Of Edmund Morris'

HERE Morris, on the plains that we have loved,

Think of the death of Akoose, fleet of foot,

Who, in his prime, a herd of antelope

From sunrise, without rest, a hundred miles

Drove through rank prairie, loping like a wolf,

Tired them and slew them, ere the sun went down.

Akoose, in his old age, blind from the smoke

Of tepees and the sharp snow light, alone

With his great grandchildren, withered and spent,

Crept in the warm sun along a rope

Stretched for his guidance. Once when sharp autumn

Made membranes of thin ice upon the sloughs,

He caught a pony on a quick return

Of prowess, and, all his instincts cleared and quickened,

He mounted, sensed the north and bore away

To the Last Mountain Lake where in his youth

He shot the sand-hill-cranes with his flint arrows.

And for these hours in all the varied pomp

Of pagan fancy and free dreams of foray

And crude adventure, he ranged on entranced,

Until the sun blazed level with the prairie,

Then paused, faltered and slid from off his pony.

In a little bluff of poplars, hid in the bracken,

He lay down; the populace of leaves

In the lithe poplars whispered together and trembled,

Fluttered before a sunset of gold smoke,

With interspaces, green as sea water,

And calm as the deep water of the sea.

There Akoose lay, silent amid the bracken,

Gathered at last with the Algonquin Chieftains.

Then the tenebrous sunset was blown out,

And all the smoky gold turned into cloud wrack.

Akoose slept forever amid the poplars,

Swathed by the wind from the far-off Red Deer

Where dinosaurs sleep, clamped in their rocky tombs.

Who shall count the time that lies between

The sleep of Akoose and the dinosaurs?

Innumerable time, that yet is like the breath

Of the long wind that creeps upon the prairie

And dies away with the shadows at sundown.

. . . . . .

What we may think, who brood upon the theme,

Is, when the old world, tired of spinning, has fallen

Asleep, and all the forms, that carried the fire

Of life, are cold upon her marble heart–

Like ashes on the altar–just as she stops,

That something will escape of soul or essence,–

The sum of life, to kindle otherwhere:

Just as the fruit of a high sunny garden,

Grown mellow with autumnal sun and rain,

Shrivelled with ripeness, splits to the rich heart,

And looses a gold kernel to the mould,

So the old world, hanging long in the sun,

And deep enriched with effort and with love,

Shall, in the motions of maturity,

Wither and part, and the kernel of it all

Escape, a lovely wraith of spirit, to latitudes

Where the appearance, throated like a bird,

Winged with fire and bodied all with passion,

Shall flame with presage, not of tears, but joy.