THE DEAD PUEBLO
I
A valley with its ancient hills
Deep-founded in earth’s adamant
And crested dark with driven cloud,
Like warrior’s trophies blown aslant:
With zenith-high a riven space,
Whence royal from his azured zones
The golden sun strikes sheer where lie
The dead pueblo’s fallen stones:
A ruin upon the mesa top
Above the scarred arroyo’s sands,
Its ochres crimsoned by the glow,
Mid rock-strewn solitudes it stands:
Where citadelled as now with light
Its ramparts stood a thousand years,
The valley’s strong Acropolis
Against the gathering murk of fears:
When Caesars held imperial sway
Its dusky warriors manned their wall;
Round council-fires its chieftains sate
When Roland fell at Roncevalles:
What time the looms of Flanders wove,
Its women spun their fleecy thread;
They fashioned earthen burial jars
While wailing mere mourned Arthur dead:
The dancers gathered to its feasts
The while Columbus sailed the seas;
At Coronado curious gazed
Its children from their mothers’ knees:
And there where now is grass-grown nave,
Walls summer-breached and winter-rent,
To pray before a Christian saint
Came many a dark-hued penitent:
But yesterday its people passed
Into their silence and their night,
Leaving their broken walls to glow
Encrimsoned by the shafted light:
Leaving their valley’s purpled hills
To gather glamours and to brood,
Scornful of man and his phantom years,
In vast and patient solitude.
II
In the days of the Sires of the People
Came the First-remembered of Men
Forth from the wombs of mothering Night,
To seek their Sign and to find their Light,
And to hew them homes mid the virgin loams,
Then, as ever again.
Out of the mists of the past they marched,
Children of Earth and of Sky,——
The red-soil land was theirs to claim,
The hill-born torrent their flood to tame,
And avalanche-thrown was the quarry-stone
For their houses builded high.
They gathered them where the valleys smiled,
They gathered them, tribe and clan,——
They laid their walls through the sunny days;
They broke their fields and they tilled their maize,
And they sang them airs and chanted them prayers
That come with the joy of man.
Till up from the glowing desert,
And up from the wandering plain,
The greased and painted warriors crept
With sudden whoop on them that slept——
Like wolves in bands from the famished lands,——
And they left a bloody stain.
They ravaged the peaceful farmsteads,
They shattered and scattered the folk,
And they filled the land with a deathly spell,
Where Apache stealth and Comanche yell
And the treacherous blow of the Navaho
Their nightly terrors woke.
Till the chieftains counselled in sorrow
Mid the sound of women’s woe,
And they swore to build them a fortress-keep,
And to hold their lands, and to sow and reap
Where Sacred Earth had given them birth,
Whatso might be their foe!
And they set the rocks of their citadel
On the mesa’s granite crest,
And their terraces rose till the barren space
Became a nation’s gathering place,
And the red light shone from the stubborn stone
Where the People dwelt at rest.
And a new Age dawned and their troubled Morn
Passed into the splendid Day;
And they sang from their roofs when their work was done
High-chanted hymns to the Fathering Sun;
And their bows were strong and the arrow’s prong
Kept the carrion tribes at bay.