Song to the Divine Mother

I know, Supernal Woman, Thou dost seek
No song of man, no worship and no praise;
But Thou wouldst have dead lips begin to speak,
And dead feet rise to walk immortal ways.

Yet listen, Mighty Mother, to the child
Who has no voice but song to tell his grief-
Nothing but tears and broken numbers wild,
Nothing but woodland music for relief.

His

song is but a little broken cry,

Less than the whisper of a river reed;
Yet thou canst hear in it the souls that die-
Feel in its pain the vastness of our need.

I would not break the mouth of song to tell
My life's long passion and my heart's long grief,
But Thou canst hear the ocean in one shell,

And see the whole world's winter in one leaf.

So here I stand at the world's weary feet,

I

And cry the sorrow of the world's dumb years: cry because I hear the world's heart beat, Weary of hope and broken through by tears.

Song to the Divine Mother

For ages Thou hast breathed upon mankind
A faint wild tenderness, a vague desire;
For

ages stilled the whirlwinds of the mind, And sent on lyric seers the rush of fire.

Some day our homeless cries will draw Thee down,
And the old brightness on the ways of men
Will send a hush upon the jangling town,
And broken hearts will learn to love again.

Come, Bride of God, to fill the vacant Throne,
Touch the dim Earth again with sacred feet;
Come build the Holy City of white stone,

And let the whole world's gladness be complete.

Come with the face that hushed the heavens

of old

Come with Thy maidens in a mist of light; Haste, for the night falls and the shadows fold, And voices cry and wander on the height.

The Flying Mist

I watch afar the moving Mystery,

The wool-shod, formless terror of the sea

The Mystery whose lightest touch can change The world God made to phantasy, death-strange. Under its spell all things grow old and

gray

As they will be beyond the Judgment Day.
All voices, at the lifting of some hand,
Seem calling to us from another land.
Is it the still Power of the Sepulcher

That makes all things the wraiths of things that

were?

It touches, one by one, the wayside posts,
And they are gone, a line of hurrying ghosts.
It creeps upon the towns with stealthy feet,
And men are phantoms on a phantom street.
It strikes the towers and they are shafts of air,
Above the spectres passing in the square.

The Flying Mist

The city turns to ashes, spire by spire;
The mountains perish with their peaks afire.
The fading city and the falling sky

Are swallowed in one doom without a cry.

It tracks the traveler fleeing with the gale, Fleeing toward home and friends without avail; It springs upon him and he is a ghost,

A blurred shape moving on a soundless coast. God! it pursues my love along the stream, Swirls round her and she is forever dream. What Hate has touched the universe with eld, And left me only in a world dispelled?

One day a child ran after me in the street,
To give me a half-blown rose, a fire-white rose,
Its stem all warm yet from the tight-shut hand.
The little gift seemed somehow more to me
Than all men strive for in the turbid towns,
Than all they hoard up through a long wild life.
And as I breathed the heart-breath of the flower,
The Youth of Earth broke on me like a dawn,
And I was with the wide-eyed wondering things,
Back in the far forgotten buried time.

A lost world came back softly with the rose:
I saw a glad host follow with lusty cries