Christ was your lord and captain all your life,

Respect them for that pious fidelity;But you have disfeatured time for timelessness.They had heroes for companions, beautiful youths to dream of,rose-marble-fingeredWomen shed light down the great lines;But you have invoked the slime in the skull,The lymph in the vessels. They have shown men Gods likeracial dreams, the woman’s desire,The man’s fear, the hawk-faced prophet’s; but…

Have shed the feeble delusions that built them,They stand inhumanlyClean and massive; they have lost their priests.But the cross-bearing stonesStill foot corruption, and their faces carvedWith hopes and terrorsAt length too savagely annulled to be leftEven ridiculous.Long-suffering saints, flamelike aspirers,You have won your reward:You sleep now as easily as any dead murdererOr worn-out lecher.To have…

And here the heavy future hangs like a cloud; theenormous scene; the enormous games preparingWeigh on the water and strain the rock; the stage ishere, the play is conceived; the players arenot found.I saw on the Sierras, up the Kaweah valley above theMoro rock, the mountain redwoodsLike red towers on the slopes of snow; about…

Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poemAbout the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shoreOf the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering allHis racial past. But now I don’t think so. They’ll die faceless in flocks,And the earth flourish long after mankind is…

Like the historical republics corruption and empireHas been known for years.Be angry at the sun for settingIf these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors.This republic, Europe, Asia.Observe them gesticulating,Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionateMan plays his part; the…

Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in theirsummer, they spiralBlind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing liveslong, the whole sky’sRecurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulfbefore birth, and the gulfAfter death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch…