Hand in Hand/To One More Fortunate

by Alice MacDonald Fleming

To One More Fortunate

 

"I have a room whereinto no one enters
Save I myself alone:
There sits a blessed memory on a throne,
There my life centres."

Christina Rossetti.

 

AH happy soul, since Life cannot estrange
One blessed memory,
In your calm haven, safe from chance and change,
I pray you pity me!

I, too, had once a memory in a shrine,
My treasure, guarded fast:
And while I deemed it deathless, wholly mine,
The Present killed the Past.

I had borne all without a tear or moan,
My accolade of pain;
All bitterness, all sorrow I have known,
Were not that memory slain.

I should not once have thought my life was sad,
My pathway lonely,
I should have toiled on singing, had I had
That memory only.

Now sometimes when the evening turns to night
Before the stars arise,
The memory flits a ghost, and charnel light
Glows out of empty eyes.

There is a place, a place I needs must haunt,
While all the world’s asleep:
There lies a murdered memory, stark and gaunt,
There my heart stays to weep.