Blue-grey horses
Like floating misty patches, red and setting-sun suffused,
Yonder in the eternal land, distant banks were shimmering.
Nothing was discernible: revelations were refused.
All the promise that I saw was was vagrant, silent shivering.
Save for the vagrant silence, the lethal colds wild pillaging,
The eternal land is sad alas, sad and utterly desolate.
Lying buried in cold earth, eyes have lost their glimmering:
Cold and fireless in the grave, the soul lies joyless, desperate.
Skeletal stands of lifeless trees, forests of mad faces and forces,
Disembodied run the days quicker, crazier they race.
Dreams, mirages manifest, these my blue-grey horses
Are to speed you here to rest. Every one is in its place.
Second after second speeds, yet I cannot feel contrition.
Pillows of eternity stay impervious to tears.
Martyred passion vanishes, insubstantial midnight vision,
Like sporadic bursts of fire, or the Fates revolving wheel,
Blue-grey horses blow a flash, a blast of thundercloud.
Gone are all the flowers now: dreams diminish till they yield.
Only burial remains, in a cold grave underground.
Who will recognize your face, who will know and speak your name?
Who will hear and trust your call, a call remote, ephemeral?
No consolatory breast, no seraphic solace came:
Spiral stairs downs to the dark hide the cryptic chimaeras.
Darkness cannot overcome beams that form a vault of light.
All but listless ciphers gone, in the wilderness it shone.
Skeletal stands of lifeless trees staring faces crazed with fright
Roused the days and sent them back, into the pit, daylight gone.
Still, in pillaging flocks of mist, overhanging the eternal land,
Damned with an eternal curse, on the earth or underground,
Like sporadic breaking waves, like the Fates revolving hand,
Blue-grey horses blow a flash, a blast of thundercloud.
1915