Smoke from This Altar (1990) Read Online Free Page A

Smoke from This Altar (1990)
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The insignificant ever dislike To he reminded of insignificance?
    You were the best of them, Bruno, the best
    By more than the flames that wrought the Change In the monads of your soul. As the flames Engulfed in fiery foam your anguished lips,
    Did you dying, wonder at those foolish ones Who sought to stifle truth with violence?
    *

Smoke From This Altar (1990)

THE WEARY ONE
    I wandered along the dusty way seeking the dawn of another day, like a drifting chip on a lonely stream, like a breath of wind or a vagrant dream a forgotten soul on a weary quest
    searching for home and love and rest.
    I wandered along the dusty way
    and found my idols with feet of clay,
    my letters were ashes, my castles dust the sword I wielded eaten by rust, my dreams were shattered-a heavy load is all that is left on a winding road.
    *

Smoke From This Altar (1990)

HILDEBRAND
    He walked away at dusk, and it was long Before we met again; in Singapore One night on Malay Street (a corridor
    Of darkness cleft with light) I heard a song Among ten thousand I could not be wrong A voice like booming seas along the shore Singing an old, old tune once sung before The mast on tea ships bound for old Hong kong.
    He waved to me-a bottle and a girl I saw him not again, but once I heard A seaman tell of storms along the strand,
    Of great, wet rocks where foaming combers curl, And of a seaman, blonde and tall, and stirred By fires of fury-that was Hildebrand.
    *

Smoke From This Altar (1990)

ENCHANTED MESAS
    Weary at last with way-worn wandering I paused to rest in solemn solitude, Watching the sinking sun, and pondering Upon the desert's melancholy mood; The falling dark had left the day subdued,
    And crowned the sullen hills with fading light; Huge boulders loomed, a black and battered brood, Like dark, unholy spectres in the night, And gathered clans of wind went moaning in their flight.
    Along the burnt-out ridges wind-swept rocks Heaved granite backs against the evening sky,
    A brutal, barren land whose silence mocks Man's empty efforts to identify His works with these exhausted hills, that lie Like some abandoned world left desolate, Whose stark remains are all that signify
    Some half-completed effort to create
    From fires that fused these hills and left them devastate.
    These blasted rocks, so lifeless, numb, and stillA land of mighty cliffs that stand aghast
    Upon the desert's brink, without the will
    To face the yucca's mute battalions, massed
    Like nightmare creatures from the ages past Returned to conquer fiefs they knew of old;
    These crumbling walls, and rambling ramparts vast, And tumbled stones from nature's shattered mold Their solitude is mine, and all their moonlit gold.
    Like clinkers from an ash-heap of the gods Or toys of Titans, torn and tossed away; Grim monuments to war against the odds
    Of storm and rain, or winds that wildly play Across the cacti-studded sands to flay With violence, and seek to overwhelm These rocky spires that neither bend nor sway; Time has no meaning here-Space holds the helm, And years, like clouds pass by, while silence rules the realm.
    The canyons weave their winding arabesque While cliffs like frozen thunder stand aside
    And weather-molded stones, in shapes grotesque Lean lonesomely above the desert's tide;
    These hills are mine . . . their wasted flanks confide, Their ghostly fingered dawns reach out for
    me, For we are kin, and time shall not divide
    My heart from this, our voiceless colloquy But let us rest alone for all eternity.
    *

Smoke From This Altar (1990)

MY THREE FRIENDS
    I have three friends, three faithful friends, More faithful could not beAnd every night, by the dim firelight, They
    come to sit
    with me.
    The first of these is tall and thin
    With hollow cheeks, and a toothless grin; A ghastly stare, and scraggly hair, And an ugly lump for a chin.
    The second of these is short and fat With beady eyes, like a starving ratHe was soaked in sin to his oily slain, And verminous, at that.
    The crouching
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