ENTER the unremembered city:
Command before your eyes, call forth
To horrified sight those whom even the keenest
Among you have forgotten: stare:
Like gluttonous orchids flowering forth, and flooded
With emerald light: monstrous, tender, exact:
The child whose hands, strangely equipped for love,
Turn like a leaf to terror; yes, and he
Whom life has treated gently, now grown pallid,
Shapeless as water, a kinsman of the plant;
He who in tears remembers everything,
A thousand grey chicaneries and sorrows
Dimmed, but by weakness, not by time;
He who has learned to shape his daily love
Thus: a slow ritual of tongue and tooth
Crusted with evil; and the one who dreams
Only in the presence of watchers, whose bleak mind
Spills into being postures beyond all dread,
Horribly expert; he who lives in ice,
Motionless, thoughtless, utterly alone;
And darker than all, the old, the old and terribly
Wizened, whose hands reflect their caverns of grief,
Who gaze all day into the arteried glass
Of their habitual hopes.
(Frederic Prokosch)
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Based on Topics: Love Poems, Light Poems, Time Poems, Water Poems, Grief Poems, Cities Poems, Good & Evil Poems, Mastery & Expertise PoemsBased on Keywords: wizened, postures, habitual, gluttonous, horrified, arteried