Henry Treece Poems

Across the road the homesick Romans made
The ground-mist thickens to a milky shroud;
Through flat, damp fields call sheep, mourning their dead
In cracked and timeless voices, unutterably sad,
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Through the dark aisles of the wood
Where the pine-needles deaden all sound
And the dove flutters in the black boughs
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In the dark caverns of the night,
Loveless and alone,
Friendless as wind that wails across the plains,
I sit, the last man left on earth,
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In this sad place
Memory hangs on the air
Fragile as Spring snail's tiny shell,
Coming to the sympathetic ear
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Death walks through the mind's dark woods,
Beautiful as aconite,
A lily-flower in his pale hand
And eyes like moonstones burning bright.
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They shall come in the black weathers
From the heart of the dead embers,
Walking one and two over the hill.
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In that stone head, obscenity
Has been preserved a thousand years;
A bible-leaf of families
Have shuddered at the pointed ears.
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How do I love you then?
Till stone unfold his nature, and
Funereal rook his language,
Tongue dumb as bell unclappered
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The bells of memory sound this summer day
Down the long alleys of the blue-skied years;
Shy cowslip, thyme, the haunting scent of hay,
Pleached gardens nourished by a lover's tears,
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He lay, wrapped in a world of mutilated hands,
Of trees that walked by night and grinning clouds;
To bellowing of bulls, his dream's black cloth
Ripped and let dropp a heart stuck full of swords.
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