| |
| O EARTH, I wonder if your trees and flowers | |
| Have moods of death, through their unmortal hours, | |
| Like us, your dreaming children. Or have they | |
| Sprouted from your clay so short a way, | |
| Rooted and planted in your procreant heart | 5 |
| So deep and warm and passionate a part | |
| Of your great pattern and the mothering whole, | |
| That they know only you, body and soul, | |
| Seed of your soil, and root and stock and vine, | |
| The fruit and flower only an up-thrust sign | 10 |
| Of your eternity?—that they are you? | |
| How should they feel the change of old and new? | |
| How should they dream of difference or death, | |
| Whose withering, unto the utmost breath, | |
| Returns into the re-creative sod, | 15 |
| To rise into re-petaled proofs of God?— | |
| Whose fates are one with the on-sweeping way | |
| Of beautiful progression and decay— | |
| The sprout, the stem, the radicle, the spray, | |
| Perfume and ashes of petals blown away? | 20 |
| How should their branches hold the smallest dread | |
| That they must one day alter and be dead? | |
| How should they shrink from death, who have no birth, | |
| Who are not even children, who are Earth? | |
| |
| We only have forsaken you for birth, | 25 |
| Severed the cord that binds us, mother, Earth— | |
| Sought separate life and individual breath, | |
| And found upon the outer highway—death. | |
| Until we grow into your heart again, | |
| Strike root and live with you, we shall know pain, | 30 |
| And all the lonely terrors of our ways— | |
| The disinherited and dismal days, | |
| The suffering selves, the alien entities, | |
| The strange desires and empty destinies. | |
| Restore us deep into your deathless scheme. | 35 |
| Dissolve our little spirits, dream on dream, | |
| Until they blend with wisdom of the trees, | |
| Recurrent flowers and root-eternities. | |
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