THE LOST MOMENT

This moment I so careless threw away,

Tossed to the ages, with a spendthrift hand,

Little I recked the labour that had planned

This flash eternal of a Summer day;

AEons of sequent toil had passed to pay

Wealth to the freighted instant. Slow and grand

Wavers a solemn dirge across the land,

One soul, in my lost moment, found a way

To throw the mock to Time, and call him slave.

And I — a pauper still — gaze wise at last

To all the grey horizon line of nought.

But from the heart I deemed an empty grave

Gleams forth like spark my precious gem of past

Shrined in the setting of a deathless thought.