THE QUIET DAYS
OLD BURYING HILL
This is a place that has forgotten tears.
The scythe and hour-glass and the skull and bones
Have lost their menace on the marred gray stones.
The long grass flows, still as the stream of years.
The goldenrod leans low her dreaming head.
Under the loving sun and the warm sky
These lichened letters tell an outworn lie,
A slander of good Death, discredited.
A drowsy cricket harps; and do but see!
With mystic orbs upon his dusky wing,
Here goes about his airy harvesting
Our little Brother Immortality.
Lost is their title, those gaunt Fears of yore:
Beauty has made this crown-land evermore.