Elegy

Too proud to die, broken and blind he died / The darkest way, and did not turn away, / A cold, kind man brave in his burning pride. // On that darkest day. Oh, forever may / He live lightly, at last, on the last, crossed / Hill, and there grow young, under the grass, in love, // Among the long flocks, and never lie lost / Or still all the days of his death, though above / All he longed all dark for his mother’s breast // Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground / The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed. / Let him find no rest but be fathered and found, // I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed, / In the muted house, one minute before / Noon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead // Moved in his poor hand I held, and I saw / Through his faded eyes to the roots of the sea. / Go calm to your crucifixed hill, I told // The air that drew away from him.