HERE am I, weary for want of Sleep,
Yet cannot reach a state of just repose ;
Stubbornly still though my body I keep,
My eyelids protestingly unclose
And I am wide, wide awake
While the world slumbers on
And quietly through the clouds doth break
A moon, as I am, pale and wan ;
And in a moment of nervous fear
A sense of the heaving night doth come,
And the rhythm of all things I can hear
Like the muffled silence of a soft-played drum.
The rhythm that controls all things
With its ceaseless come and go ;
Birth from nothingness it brings
And in turn, it deals Death’s blow ;
Before the first beginning it began,
‘Twill beat long after all final time
And its last beating only can
Vibrate into life some other clime.
Where it will plot the circled moving
Of a mass of birth and death through space
And its eternal recurrence proving,
Reach again its starting-place :
The secret touch of Creation’s hand
That moves as we may not understand –
When we pass through Death’s door,
Do we thus recur once more ;
At the start or the end or the middle,
This is the cosmic unsolvable riddle.
At last there is the dawn again.
And sleep has recurred to my weary brain. . . .
(Bernard Waters)
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