| |
| LET us have music. Play the phonograph. | |
| Put on a record of a racing jazz. | |
| Dance. Move. Sing with the crazy strain. | |
| Dance. Sing. I’m going outside to watch the moon. | |
| The moon is in the east, low in the east. | 5 |
| The nicotiana grows beside the door. | |
| Dance, young singing people, | |
| while I am outside, | |
| watching the moon, | |
| smelling the nicotiana that grows beside the door. | 10 |
| |
| Far in the east, | |
| across the lake, so motionless, so black, | |
| is the bordering forest. | |
| The forest is a fringe of jet around the shimmering silk of the lake. | |
| Above the line of trees is a vast black cloud with an upper fringe of burnished gold—the gold of the rising moon. | 15 |
| I am going outside to watch the moon | |
| and to smell the nicotiana that grows beside the door. | |
| |
| I knew a lady who lived by night— | |
| and soft was the music of long ago— | |
| I knew a lady whose presence was the burnished gold of moonlit clouds, | 20 |
| or the scent of nicotiana— | |
| the flower that opens only at the coming of the moon. | |
| Dance, young singing people. | |
| Dance away your singing youth. | |
| I remember the music of long ago; | 25 |
| and, though time is as black as a moonless murk, | |
| I cannot but remember the lady who lived by night, | |
| like the burnished gold of the clouds, | |
| like the scent of nicotiana. | |
| |
