What have I to do with them...
By Iris Tree
What have I to do with them,
The red athletes in their snow-white clothes?
They are sun lovers and moon haters,
Toiling or playing in the fields
Whereon no shadows lie,
Pensively, whispering together —
They are space lovers and haters of the stars,
Soundly they sleep by night nor ever see
The tiaraed brows of darkness.
I weary of their striving upward and onward,
Away from the green hush of twilight,
Where silence drips from the trees,
Away from the solemn avenues
Where the ghosts blow by
Along with a drift of leaves.
Let us linger awhile
Far away from the frets and wars of the world,
From the strong men
With their strident hymning voices and marching feet —
Let us walk alone
For the love of our own shadows
Stretching their length on lawns of powdered silver,
With behind us the sky's grey curtain
Drawn backward from the moon....
Let us sit by the fireside
And hear the wind's shrill orchestras,
Fiddle and fife and flute,
And omened bagpipe screaming....
Let us lie abed and dream
Through the long summer's morning
Of trivial things, and beautiful....
Let us dance with Folly when midnight knocks on his golden gong;
Let us run through pools of wine
And be splashed with purple.
Let us, being sick, make merry,
And rejoice when we are weary.
Let us sit by our grave as at a banquet,
Drinking to Death.
What have we to do with them,
Sons of the sun and the soil,
Daughters of the hearth and the field?
They that remake the world
Melting our idols for silver,
Our goblets for gold;
Tearing our temples down
To build their red brick villages.
The doomed world faints into mist,
World of our indolence and dreams,
And the faces and bodies we love
Sink through oblivion, and are seen
Dimly, as divers through the waters.
Old worlds and new worlds!
Let us slip between them,
And float on the stream that floweth nowhither —
Our red ambitions burn
To a blue smoke of forgetting;
Our moonshine faints on the tide that goeth out,
As the sun leers to the tide that cometh in.