I have heard you cry:
“Oh that the impression of mortality
Would ease its hold and set me free!”
Your workaday face lined with immortal cares
As if you feared that unawares
The indestructible flowers of Paradise
Might suddenly droop and wither
In a brief, thoughtless intermission of your eyes
And all your journey thither
End in consummate vacancy.
And you reply: “All else did fade but they”
And I:
“In a long afternoon, long, long ago,
I Adam awoke in the one and only eve
Of my sunsetting and beginning
And the first unending of evening.
How can I mourn for what I chose to leave?”
And you: “Chose you to leave?”
And I: “Or how delay
The starting point of this my only road
Where other flowers and other pleasures gem and bud
And all my kindred go,
Or find a different face from this one face
Twisted with tears and laughter,
And the commandment: ‘To be, to be’?
On which I read: all is Sefore and after,
Then since you are here, off with you, go abroad”
And you: “Death also says: To be”
And I, impatiently:
“Good man, you are here, not there.
Here you are not at ease, but must prefer
What you were born for, this your place,
Where all moves towards infinity
At a snail’s or a herd’s pace,
Plods, hurries, dawdles: finding, choosing its rhyme,
Science gathering gossip of what’s so small
And great, no eye can see it.
You must make friends with all
Then wait awhile; how can all things be done in time?
And you are in time”.
And you: “I am a footstep from eternity
And cannot lift my foot”
And I:
“You have denied the root
And think there is nothing here but night and day,
Sun and moon, man and star,
And death will take away them all.
But I say
That these great nothings, man and sun and star,
Will say through nothingness: we are, we are”
And you: “I know too well the dupes of time.
Have you not heard them say:
‘Do be in time, be sure you are in time’
With such a strange anxiety?
And once or twice these words: ‘Oh, let me be,
Do let me be’.
As if drab Penury itself were trying to say
Through these poor lips …”