Classic Poem

I remember an ancient Chinese picture kept over there in Daitokuji,
That long low pair of roofs to the North that cut the brocaded green of the rice-fields, like gray scissors.
No one but him of the Dragon's Brightness could have designed it.
Once it was exhibited to the blind, borrowed for the Art Museum of Boston.
It was a world of clouds, as should befit a mystic soul-drama;
Far up peered out the wrinkled and unkempt gray face of a dead saint.
Awakened by the prayers of floating spirits to behold the wonder of his own immediate re-incarnation,
He stared in bewilderment with his hands instinctively clasped in prayer.
A simply clad pair, a Chinese husband and wife, stood reverently with frames bent slightly forward,
Hands clasped, faces sweetly lifted in gladness, but in absence of wonder at the miracle,
Stood ready to receive the soul for which they had prayed.
And lo, walking down the path of the clouds,
A figure like a Chinese nurse, in cap and wadded garment,
But gleaming with unearthly brightness,
Bears to them with careful step on a golden dish, and wrapped in a crystal globe,
A little naked crouching babe, the soft casket of the new-old soul;
While back of all stands a master spirit, whose very fingers are like knots with the currents of power.
Here between two clay tabernacles of the dead and quick
Hovered the soul in the miracle of an immediate passage
Of a saint whose life deserved instant renewal of its self-sacrifice, whose continuity of life the world needed.
Yet it is but the perfect type of what in us is only delayed.
It will not be long before these old hands which can do hardly more than relight this incense,
Will be bathing in azalea flames on Mount Hiyeizan, and patting the mossy grisly face of some wayside Jizo.