The Wood Lily

LONG years the lily grew,
Sun-nurtured and earth-fed,
That to-day is full and red.

Its blind, ancestral cell
In woods of ancient time
First shaped its perfect prime.

And seed by filial seed
Through years and worlds descending
And tribes and wars unending,

The lily bloomed and sang
In a secret place apart,
With silence at its heart.

In glades of sunlight dappled
Where wind shook down the sky
It felt the wild bee’s thigh.

Snows fell a thousand winters
And world-long fell the rain
That it might flower again.

So, child of time and earth,
Seed of a long descent,
By breath of green airs bent

That shine among the leaves,
Wine-flushed, apart, and still
The lily bloomed; until,

With heart surcharged and shaken
I wandered there to-day,
And plucked, and bore away

The straight, leaf-feathered stem,
The urn of sun-flushed red,
To give to her I wed.

For we, and our love’s burden,
By sun and earth and time
To a less perfect prime

Were nurtured, and we grew
To cycles formed and wrought
Ere wars began, or thought.

Children of long descent,
From seed to filial seed
We bear an ageless need,

Desire that lives unuttered
Until the senses faint
Muffled with dark restraint,

Longing that cries more sharply
Through deeper loneliness
To those we most possess.

For though by links of ages,
Ascending through blind cells
And drinking at deep wells,

We come at last to union
Fed by long springs of time
And nourished to sweet prime,

We walk still subtly severed
And doomed to longing still
As by a mightier hill

Than e’er shed waters downward
From the great founts of snow
Toward separate seas to flow.

What is the last fruition
That all earth’s heart desires,
And deathlessly aspires

By art or hope or sorrow
To fashion for our saving,
Bread of our final craving,

Water for deepest thirst?
O let the lily tell
That grew long years and well

In glades of sunlight dappled
Where wind shook down the sky,
Tasting the wild bee’s thigh,

Bent by green airs, and nurtured
By wine of sun and rain
Ever to flower again;

The lily that bloomed and sang
In a secret place apart,
With silence at its heart.