THE DEAD MOON
by: Danske Dandridge (1854-1914)
- E are ghost-ridden:
- Through the deep night
- Wanders a spirit,
- Noiseless and white;
- Loiters not, lingers not, knoweth not rest,
- Ceaselessly haunting the East and the West.
-
- She, whose undoing the ages have wrought,
- Moves on to the time of Gods rhythmical thought.
- In the dark, swinging sea,
- As she speedeth through space,
- She reads her pale image;
- The wounds are agape on her face.
- She sees her grim nakedness
- Pierced by the eyes
- Of the Spirits of God
- In their flight through the skies.
- (Her wounds, -- they are many and hollow.)
- The Earth turns and wheels as she flies,
- And this Spectre, this Ancient, must follow
-
- When, in the æons,
- Had she beginning?
- What is her story?
- What was her sinning?
- Do the ranks of the Holy Ones
- Know of her crime?
- Does it loom in the mists
- Of the birthplace of Time?
- The stars, do they speak of her
- Under their breath,
- Will this Wraith be forever
- Thus restless in death?
- On, through immensity,
- Sliding and stealing,
- On, through infinity,
- Nothing revealing?
-
- I see the fond lovers:
- They walk in her light;
- They charge the soft maiden
- To bless their love-plight.
- Does she laugh in her place,
- As she glideth through space?
- Does she laugh in her orbit with never a sound?
- That to her, a dead body,
- With nothing but rents in her round--
- Blighted and marred,
- Wrinkled and scarred,
- Barren and cold,
- Wizened and old--
- That to her should be told,
- That to her should be sung
- The yearning and burning of them that are young?
-
- Our Earth that is young,
- That is throbbing with life,
- Has fiery upheavals,
- Has boisterous strife;
- But she that is dead has no stir, breathes no air;
- She is calm, she is voiceless, in lonely despair.
- We dart through the void;
- We have cries, we have laughter;
- The phantom that haunts us
- Comes silently after.
- This Ghost-lady follows,
- Though none hear her tread;
- On, on, we are flying,
- Still tracked by our Dead--
- By this white, awful Mystery,
- Haggard and dead.
"The Dead Moon" is reprinted
from An American Anthology, 17871900. Ed. Edmund
Clarence Stedman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900. |
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