Within your family tomb . . . What? Will they let me?
You are dead, and hatred only follows
To the gates that lead to Hades. My beloved
You would be moved to wonder now, to hear that one
Should dare to question the right to bury you,
You! . . Emperor! . . . The Lord of men! . . . Their ruler.
Yes, that will be your final service Akte,
The final means of serving your former master,
The final homage, offered by a flower
To her lifeless sun, and after that
Poor Akte? . . . Is there for you an “After?”
THE LAND OF PALESTINE
Within Caesarea’s proud castle tower
King Herod sat, his head in palms reclining.
The king, a weary wasted man whose life
By many ills was being undermined.
Westwardly racing, sped the crimson sunset
Into the waves that bear the blood red ring
To the tower’s base . . . . The King just turned his head,
For painful is this light to tired eyes,
And he gazes across the stretching Plain of Sharon.
His gaze first fell upon Gerizim’s summit,
And thence, like one infirm with age, it stole
Across Sebastia, to Bethel, and
Then further yet, to distant Antipatris.
A few steps more it dragged and then stood still
Steeped in the verdant sea. How near now seem
Its waves! The tops of palms and olives,
The crooked sycamores and tetrabinths with their naked
Bark-free bodies, the pastures’ buoyant grasses
All swelled and raised, all helter-skelter rushing
Toward the bluish mountain-tops that eastward rise.
Those golden islands bathing in this ocean,
Fields rich with crops, around them endless fences
Of mighty cactus, full of crimson blossoms
As if besmeared with blood just freshly shed.
And over all, a reddish light is playing
Like a bloody dust . . . . . .
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