Classic Poem

SAGA OF THE NORTH

In the Beginning

Vision the sun and stars,
The gold-faced central sun,
Wandering like glittering Apollo
With the planet muses
Across the star-enamelled fields of space.
Spy out the tilting ice-tipped Earth,
Curving through nothingness,
Dogged by her blue void-shadow.
Look from the eyes in the astonished mask
Of the beardless and purse-mouthed moon
At the merging and melting of moods
On the face of the northern hemisphere.

THE HAND IS IN THE GLOVE ,
WHICH IS CLASPED BY SUNS
AND BUTTONED BY THE EARTH,
YET THE WRINKLING OF MATTER
SHOWS THE WORKING OF FINGERS
Shades of the seasons pass across the face of continents
Like cloud shadows over dun woodlands;
The Earth rocks with eleven-fold motion;
Storms gather; arrow-headed flocks of birds shoot from continent to continent;
The sea leaps over the dim shoal of Atlantis
Dark as an evil memory in the azure brain of ocean.
Twinkling beneath the chromatic kaleidoscope of sun, star, and moonlight,
In rays splashed from behind the plains of Nowhere,
The saw-toothed, ice-pinnacled arc of Earth
Sweeps titanically into the northern horizon.
Now the blueness of a six-months night
Occults its glittering bow, and now —
The snowfields glare a half-year day,
While as the sphere spins, murmurous with storms
And the complaining voice of islands
Chafed by ice-scummed seas,
The circle of the boreal aurora flickers into heaven,
Shaking its blue corona like the light from steel swords
Threatening the fixed stars and the planets.

PRESSED INTO THE BLUE SLATE
IS THE FIVE-TOED SIGIL OF A SMALL DRAGON.
IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR BRAIN LIES HIS THIRD EYE.
Come closer, Watcher in the High-skies,
That you may behold the expressions of time
Upon the face of the planet.
That faint trumpeting, which dies away
Like the lowing of monstrous star-cattle,
Marks the passing of the mastodon.
Now, the ice-fields melting northward,
Grass creeps upward like a green flame
Following the steaming moraine of the glacier.
Bison sweep across the tundras
Like patches of brown wingless flies.
Among the hills, from silver breasts of lakes,
Come glittering, one by one, small iridescent pin-points
Like red rat-eyes in the darkness,
Until the wide blue plains of the planet
Light up in mockery of the galaxy
With constellated tribal camp-fires of men.
Portentous secrets down there:
Sketching on the damp walls of caverns,
Patiently in a splash of lamplight,
Longheads trace the red-legged bison
Upon the walls of hill-caves.
Hands, no longer fumbling, carve the deer horns.
Flint flakes grow smoother and keener.
Crooked sticks disturb the Earth.
Dolmens point the sun path, —
And man tells stories about the sky-people.

GRAVEN UPON THE HORN OF AN EXTINCT DEER
STANDS A MAMMOTH WITH CURLY TUSKS
AND A DOT FOR AN EYE.
HIS ETCHED HAIR DROOPS DISCONSOLATELY.