Clair De Lune

OVER my head were the pine tops, gray in the midsummer moon ;
Compassed I was by the shadows — cavernous deep and soft —
And ever the forest’s silence that seemed to listen, alive.
Sometimes I caught, down a glade, the sudden gleam of a birch;
White as a straight, slim column, bearing the roof of the night.
Sometimes a firefly flashed, and a bit of leaf grew distinct,
Vivid against the dark, and melting to dark again.
Warm was the air with pine boughs long dried in the sun ;
And once there came to me there the drifted scent of the fern
And of moist fresh earth, and I guessed that water was near.
Speedily then came the lilt of a tinkling whisper of sound
That trailed through the night and the listening aisles of the wood —
Ah, the brook ! and I felt that a comrade was close.
Alone it was, but crooning a song to itself, as a child
Will sing to itself in the dark for a challenge to fear.
A cool-leafed bough of a birch stretched like an arm o’er the path,
Touching me as I passed, softly ; just as a friend
Will lay a quick hand upon one and whisper a brave “ Good cheer ! ”
Oh, the moon on the pines, and the gleam
Of light-shafts broken by leaves scattered upon the ground !
And oh, the breath of the night, — the inviolate leagues of the dark,
With sudden spaces of light, arras’d with tremulous leaves,
Where scarce I dared look, lest, perchance,
Diana, goddess and maid, glistening white through the gloom,
Should be standing, her bow tense-drawn, on guard at some sylvan shrine!

That sudden sound in the leaves, — was it the brook, or Pan,
The great brown wood god himself, drunken with moonlight for wine,
Chuckling there, close at hand, over some midsummer dream ?
And there where the sentinel lamps of the fireflies lighted the place,
And the hush of the wood like a curtain folded in silence and peace,
I went very softly ; for there, under a canopy fern,
Haply Titania slept close, close against Oberon’s heart.
Oh, magic midsummer wood ! Oh, wonderful silver-lit dark!
When all the lost gods came back, and all the old tales were true !
When silence and shadow and dream seemed the only real things in the world,
And the doubt and the stress and the pain had faded, until they became
As far away as a star, as vague as a firefly’s gleam !