The careless seasons pass and leave me here.
The forests rise like ghosts and fade like dreams.
All has its term; flowers flicker on the ground
A summer moment, and the rock is bare.
Alone the animals trace their changeless figure,
Embodying change. Agelong I watch the leopard
Glaring at something past the end of time,
And the wild goat immobile on his rock,
Lost in a trance of roaming through the skies:
I look and he is there. But pilgrim man
Travels foreknowing to his stopping place,
Awareness on his lips, which have tasted sorrow,
Foretasted death. These strangers do not know
Their happiness is n that which leads their sorrow
Round to an end. My hope is not like theirs.
I pray for the end of alk things and this pain
Which makes me cry: Move faster, sun and stars,
And bear these chains and bear this body away
Into your flying circuit; freedom waits
There in the blessed nothingness that follows
The charging onset of the centaur-stars,
Trampling time out. For when these clamorous races
Lie silent in the ground from which they came,
And all the earth is quiet, a hush may fall
Even in he house of heaven, and the heedless gods
May raise their eyes to look and bid me come
Again among them, then when the feud is over
And fire and those in whom it blazed and died
Are strewn in ashes on the ashen hills.
What shall I say to the gods? Heaven will be strange,
And strange those scars inscribed in distant time.
Who will give answer to the earth’s dark story?
Zeus with the ponderous glory of the bull,
Or the boy Eros with hus fretful quiver?
What expectation there except at most
That this my knowledge will be an aeon’s gossip?
The shrines are emptying and the peoples changing.
It may be I should find Olympus vacant
If I should return. For I have heard a wonder:
Lands without gods; nothing but earth and water;
Words without mystery; and the only creed
An tron text to beat the round skulls flat
And fit them for the cap of a buried master.
Strange ritual. Now time’s storm is rising, sweeping
The sons of man into an emptier room,
Vast as a continent, bare as a desert,
Where the dust takes man’s lifetime to revolve
Around the walls, harried by peevish gusts
And little spiteful eddies: nothing standing
But the cast-iron cities ahd rubbish mountains.
At the world’s end to whom shall I tell the story?
A god came down, they say, from another heaven
Not in rebellion but in pity and love,
Was born a son of woman, lived and died,
And rose again with all the spoils of tme
Back to his home, where now they are/transmuted
Into bright toys and various frames of glory;
And time itself is there a world of marvels.
If I could find that god, he would hear and answer.