In a City Garden
How strange that here is nothing as it was!
The sward is young and new,
The sod there shapes a different mass,
The random trees stand other than I knew.
No, here the Past has left no residue,
No aftermath!
By a new path
The workmen homeward in the city twilight pass.
Yet was this willow here.
It hung as now its olive skeins aloft
Into the sky, then blue and clear,--
And yonder pair of poplar trees
Rose also, soft
And sibilant in the glory of the breeze.
It's early dark. One scarce distinguishes
Their sullen feathering in the autumn sky.
'Tis warm and still.
Dull o'er the town the vapours lie.
Innumerable
And dodging the uncertain stare,
The small, shrewd lampions dot the air.
Many like me
Loiter perhaps as I in after years,
As looking here to see
Some vestige of the living that was theirs,
Some trace of yesterday,
Somae hint or remnant, echo, clue--some thing,
Some very little thing of what was they.
Sure such are near! Else were it not so still
This evening,
So human-still and warm and kind.
'Tis as of many moved
In unison of will and mind to sing
Low litanies to that which they had wholly loved.
How sweet it is
Under the perishable trees
To hear the wings of the one human soul
Fluttering up
In Time's dark branches to the lucid stars.
More than Despair is Hope,
And more than Hope is the Hope that despairs,
And more than all
Is Love that disbelieves the real years.
Here in this place
One August morning--when the earlier crowd,
Showmen or populace,
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poem by Trumbull Stickney
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