Our homes are eaten out by Time,
Our lawns strewn with our listless sons,
Our harlot daughters lean and watch
The ships crammed down with shells and guns.
Like painted prows far out they lean:
A world behind, a world before.
The leaves are covering up our hills,
Neptune has locked the shore.
Our yellow harvests lie forlorn
And there we wander like the blind,
Returning from the golden field
With famine in our mind.
Far inland now the glittering swords
In order rise, in order fall,
In order on the dubious field
The dubious trumpets call.
Yet here there is no word, no sign
But quiet murder in the street.
Our leaf-light lives are spared or taken
By men obsessed and neat.
We stand beside our windows, see
In order dark disorder come,
And prentice killers duped by Death
Bring and not know our doom.
Our cattle wander at their will.
To-day a horse pranced proudly by.
The dogs run wild. Vultures and kites
Wait in the towers for us to die.
At evening on the parapet
We sit and watch the sun go down,
Reading the landscape of the dead,
The sea, the hills, the town.
There our ancestral ghosts are gathered.
Fierce Agamemnon’s form I see,
Watching as if his tents were Time
And Troy Eternity.
We must take order, bar our gates,
Fight off these phantoms. Inland now
Achilles, Siegfried, Lancelot
Have sworn to bring us low.