AH God, life, law, so many names you keep, You great, you patient Effort, and you Sleep That does inform this various dream of living, You sleep stretched out for ever, ever giving
Us out as dreams, you august Sleep Coursed round by rhythmic movement of all time, The constellations, your great heart, the sun Fierily pulsing, unable to refrain;
Since you, vast, outstretched, wordless Sleep Permit of no beyond, ah you, whose dreams We are, and body of sleep, let it never be said I quailed at my appointed function, turned poltroon
For when at night, from out the full surcharge Of a day's experience, sleep does slowly draw The harvest, the spent action to itself; Leaves me unburdened to begin again;
At night, I say, when I am gone in sleep, Does my slow heart rebel, do my dead hands Complain of what the day has had them do? Never let it be said I was poltroon
At this my task of living, this my dream, This me which rises from the dark of sleep In white flesh robed to drape another dream, As lightning comes all white and trembling
From out the cloud of sleep, looks round about One moment, sees, and swift its dream is over, In one rich drip it sinks to another sleep, And sleep thereby is one more dream enrichened.
If so the Vast, the God, the Sleep that still grows richer Have said that I, this mote in the body of sleep Must in my transiency pass all through pain, Must be a dream of grief, must like a crude
Dull meteorite flash only into light When tearing through the anguish of this life, Still in full flight extinct, shall I then turn Poltroon, and beg the silent, outspread God
To alter my one speck of doom, when round me burns The whole great conflagration of all life, Lapped like a body close upon a sleep, Hiding and covering in the eternal Sleep
Within the immense and toilsome life-time, heaved With ache of dreams that body forth the Sleep? Shall I, less than the least red grain of flesh Within my body, cry out to the dreaming soul
That slowly labours in a vast travail, To halt the heart, divert the streaming flow That carries moons along, and spare the stress That crushes me to an unseen atom of fire?
When pain and all And grief are but the same last wonder, Sleep Rising to dream in me a small keen dream Of sudden anguish, sudden over and spent —
Cookies on Poetry Cove