The City Revisited
The grey gulls drift across the baySoftly and still as flakes of snowAgainst the thinning fog. All dayI sat and watched them come and go;And now at last the sun was set,Filling the waves with colored fireTill each seemed like a jewelled spireThrust up from some drowned city. SoonFrom peak and cliff and minaretThe city’s lights began to wink,Each like a friendly word. The moonBegan to broaden out her shield,Spurting with silver. Straight beforeThe brown hills lay like quiet beastsStretched out beside a well-loved door,And filling earth and sky and fieldWith the calm heaving of their breasts.
Nothing was gone, nothing was changed,The smallest wave was unestrangedBy all the long ache of the yearsSince last I saw them, blind with tears.Their welcome like the hills stood fast:And I, I had come home at last.
So I laughed out with them aloudTo think that now the sun was broad,And climbing up the iron sky,Where the raw streets stretched sullenlyAbout another room I knew,In a mean house—and soon there, too,The smith would burst the flimsy doorAnd find me lying on the floor.Just where I fell the other night,After that breaking wave of pain.—How they will storm and rage and fight,Servants and mistress, one and all,“No money for the funeral!”
I broke my life there. Let it standAt that.The waters are a plain,Heaving and bright on either hand,A tremulous and lustral peaceWhich shall endure though all things cease,Filling my heart as water fillsA cup. There stand the quiet hills.So, waiting for my wings to grow,I watch the gulls sail to and fro,Rising and falling, soft and swift,Drifting along as bubbles drift.And, though I see the face of GodHereafter—this day have I trodNearer to Him than I shall treadEver again. The night is dead.And there’s the dawn, poured out like wineAlong the dim horizon-line.And from the city comes the chimes—
We have our heaven on earth—sometimes!