WATCHERS
I watch the Eastern sky
For a sign of dawn
Long delayed.
Such stillness is around
That every separate sense
Is twice-attuned, twice-powerful,
And loneliness enwraps me like a sea
Into whose unplumbed depths I must go down:
A sea unsatisfied
Where drifting shapes, wan-eyed,
Reach forth wan arms
Towards them who pause to look at their own souls
Mirrored upon the sea.
Somewhere a loon
Sends forth its weary cry across the dark.
Oh, wailing bird, I know, I know!
I think tonight the soul of the world is desolate
And you and I its watchers.
Yet cease! oh cease!
The night air quivers and resounds
To bear your cry across the sleeping lake,
And I would have your silence
While I make
My own complaint.
For I would ask why we who have so little space
To live and love and wonder
Must go down into eternal mystery
Alone:
And I would know
Why, since that awful loneliness must be,
We go about as strangers here on earth
And meet and laugh and mock and part again
With never a look into each others’ eyes,
With never a question of each others’ pain.
So, even as I hear your melancholy plaint
Across the sleeping lake,
I send my questing cry across the world—
And as I watch and listen,
Through the stillness
There comes to me an echoing and a far reverberation
Of the many who have gone
Into the limitless mystery,
And thus they speak—
“We too have known your questing,
We too have stretched our arms forth to the night
And clasped its nothingness,
We too have lived and loved and wondered
For a little space
And then gone onward,
And we seek across the silence
To send our voices
Out, out, across the dark.”
Is it your voice I hear, oh far, strange bird,
Or is it theirs—
Theirs who have gone onward
Alone and unafraid?
Is there an answer I may sometime find,
Or is it that our lips are dumb,
Our eyes are blind,
When love would come?
Now faint light comes upon the shadowy sky,
The East is waking and the day begins.
You send your cry across the quivering lake,
I send my question out across the world,
We watch, we two,
Alone.