Classic Poem

I grieve to think of you alone
That first night watch when I am gone:

How darkness will assault your breath
And mind with frightening thoughts of death;

How inescapable the stress
Of that strange new emptiness;

How dawn such as you've never seen
Will streak its gray and yellow-green;

How shadows in a drifting pall
Will shift across this friendly wall!

I grieve that I shall not be there
To talk with you in your despair —

To reassure you in a glance
Mastery of the circumstance,

Speaking a language coded to
The key that I have given you;

Whispering low some silly word
That but our rooms and we have heard —

Nomenclature which should confound
The horror of the underground!

I'd sit a little while and speak
With my lips moving on your cheek

To help you face the awful dread
Of watching by your newly dead . . . !

Oh, that somehow I might contrive
My first night dead to be alive . . . !