RESTLESS is the present night,
Fearfully it seems to shiver,
No wind there is and yet
Strangely the leaves quiver.
Rigid though the trunks must be.
The old twisted forms, – plain
Against the depthless sky –
Are moving monuments of Pain.
Warm though the night is
And softened the formal line,
The moon is sick of the familiar.
Chilled damp is the spine.
Autumn has not yet mellowed
To full-bosomed sadness ;
Still snivels the petulant earth
For Summer and departed gladness.
Nature, a nervous old man
At the hurry of dying.
Feels tragedy, knows not the calm
And beauteous trust lying
In the prayer he yearly weaves
In the rustling utterance of leaves.
Life is too cruelly inevitable
And Man is too present here
And the bareness of achievement.
Like the twisted trunks, too clear ;
Humanity and its full-veined leaves
Falling at a touch in their prime
Into the clutch of the sniggering wind
To be dust in the lap of time.
Humanity – a twisted trunk,
Twisted with an exact pain –
A growth of embryo growths
And disentegration again.
A women pregnant with life,
A poet pregnant with thought.
Both with their pangs of birth,
Till life into void is brought.
Struggling like candle-light wan
Till there comes the Autumn swooning
And soon too soon are they gone.
Ere has ceased the parent’s crooning.
Among the limbless dust of time
Are the shadowy bodies cast,
Bodied pain of several souls
Each pitifully like the last.
Restless though the present night.
It will mellow with brown regret
And a rain and a blustering wind
Will inevitably beget
A state to meet winter pain,
And the puppets will show again
And strut about the same old stage,
From year to year, from age to age.
(Bernard Waters)
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