Contemporary Belgian Poetry Part 30

Showering its light upon you in caresses, And this new brazier's contact shall be in Tongues of an ambient gold that lick your skin.

The tragic, rolling red of dawn and eve, And the day's beauty you shall be; with hues Of splendour you a billowy robe shall weave;

Your flesh shall be like fabulous statues, Which in the desert sang, and shone like roses, When morning burned their blocks with apotheoses.

III.

I would not choose the sunflowers that unclose In daylight; nor the lily long of stem; Nor roses loving winds to fondle them; No, nor great nenuphars whose pulp morose,

And wide, cold eyes, charged with eternity, Upon their imaging pond yawn idle-lipped Their stirless dreams; nor flowers despotic, whipped By wrath and wind along a hostile sea,

To symbolize you. No, but shivering wet Under the dawn, with great red calyx leaves Mingling as jets of blood are fused in sheaves, A group of garden dahlias closely set,

Which, in voluptuous days of autumn, bright With matter's hot maturity and heats, Like monstrous and vermilion women's teats, Grow stiff beneath the golden hands of light.

DYING MEN.

Sharp with their ills, and lonely in their dying, The sceptic sick watch by their chamber fire, With haggard eyes, the evening magnifying The house-fronts, and the blackening church-spire.

The hour is dead where in some never-crowded City by time extinguished, desolate, They live immured in walls by mourning shrouded, And hear the monumental hinges grate.

Haggard and lone, they gaze at Death unbeaten, Like grim old wolves, the hieratic sick; Life and its days identic they have eaten, Their hate, their fate, diseases cl.u.s.tering thick.

But shaken in their cynical a.s.surance, And in their haughtiness and pale disgust, They ask: "Is happiness not in endurance Of wilful suffering, suffering loved with l.u.s.t?"

Of old they felt their hearts go out to others; Benevolent, they pitied alien griefs; And, like apostles, loved their suffering brothers, And feared their pride, cabined in dead beliefs.

But now they think that love is more cemented By cruelty than kindness, which is vain.

What of the few, chance tears they have prevented?

How many more have flowed? Decreed is pain.

Empty the golden islands are, where lingers In golden mist Dream in a mantle spun Of purple, skimming foam with idle fingers From silent gold rained by a teeming sun.

Broken the proud masts, and the waves are churning!

Steer to extinguished ports the vessel's prow: No lighthouse stretches its immensely burning Arm to the great stars--dead the fires are now.

Haggard and lone, they gaze at Death unbeaten, Like grim old wolves, the hieratic sick; Life and its days identic they have eaten, Their hate, their fate, diseases cl.u.s.tering thick.

With nails of wood they beat hot foreheads. Cages Of bones for fevers are their bodies. Blind Their eyes, their lips like withered parchment pages.

A bitter sand beneath their teeth they grind.

Now in their extinct souls a longing blazes To sail, and in a new world live again, Whose sunset like a smoking tripod raises The G.o.d of shade and ebony in its brain;

In a far land of tempests raging madly, In lands of fury hoa.r.s.e and livid dreams, Where man can drown, ferociously and gladly, His soul and all his heart in fiery streams.

They are the tragic sick sharp with diseases; Haggard and lone they watch the town fires fade; And pale facades are waiting till it pleases Their crumbling bodies have their coffins made.

THE ARMS OF EVENING.

While the cold night stories its terrace, gored And dying evening throws upon the heath, And forest fringed with marshes underneath, The gold of his armour and the flash of his sword,

Which wave to wave go floating on, too soon Yet to have lost day's flaunting ardent glow, But kissed already by the shadowed, slow Lips of the pious, silver-handed moon,

The lonely moon remembering the day, Whose brandished weapons made a golden glare, A pale wraith in the paleness of the air, The moon for ever pale and far away!

THE MILL.

Deep in the evening slowly turns the mill Against a sky with melancholy pale; It turns and turns, its muddy-coloured sail Is infinitely heavy, tired, and ill.

Its arms, complaining arms, in the dawn's pink Rose, rose and fell; and in this o'ercast eve, And deadened nature's silence, still they heave Themselves aloft, and weary till they sink.

Winter's sick day lies on the fields to sleep; The clouds are tired of sombre journeyings; And past the wood that gathered shadow flings The ruts towards a dead horizon creep.

Around a pale pond huts of beechwood built Despondently squat near the rusty reeds; A lamp of bra.s.s hung from the ceiling bleeds Upon the wall and windows blots of gilt.

And in the vast plain, with their ragged eyes Of windows patched, the suffering hovels watch The worn-out mill the bleak horizon notch,-- The tired mill turning, turning till it dies.

IN PIOUS MOOD.[1]

The winter lifts its chalice of pure night to heaven.

And I uplift my heart, my night-worn heart in turn, O Lord, my heart! to thy pale, infinite Inane, And yet I know that nought the implenishable urn May plenish, that nought is, whereof this heart dies fain; And I know thee a lie, and with my lips make prayer And with my knees; I know thy great, shut hands averse, Thy great eyes closed, to all the clamours of despair; It is I, who dream myself into the universe; Have pity on my wandering wits' entire discord; Needs must I weep my woe towards thy silence, Lord!

The winter lifts its chalice of pure night to heaven.

--OSMAN EDWARDS.

[1] _The Savoy_, No. 4, August 1896.

THE FERRYMAN.

With hands on oars the ferryman Strove where the stubborn current ran, With a green reed between his teeth.