Classic Poem

For ages since the first chaotic night
Flame lifted from this crater toward the sky,
And red plumes, since the dawn of memory,
Waved over Chimborazo's lonely height.
No echo stirs the silence of the peak;
Where ashes rained, a solitary bird
Drinks from the rain-pools; and the earth interred
Beneath its lava-blood, is sere and bleak.

Sometimes, last effort of the ancient fire,
The lava-bubbles, cold with ancient years,
Burst with sound of thunder in the hills;
And like the flare of some great funeral-pyre,
Amid gray rocks and yellow dust uprears
The crimson cactus, red with earth-fire still.