Poems (Storrie)/An Opal
An Opal.
I have a magic flower that knoweth not to fade, Rosily it blossoms through the winter undismayed, Each fairy petal keeps its satin sheen, And garners sunshine where no sun has been. The glory of uncounted summer days Lies at its core, and all the silver rays That moons have lavished on uncharted seas Fill it with glimmering mysteries.
My magic flower, unfed by air or rain, Hath in it glamours from a purple plain Drenched in still twilight and the velvet deeps Of rich sky spaces ere the first star peeps. Green of dim forests, and dew-nurtured glades, Stabbed by the noonday sun's imperial blades, And steel-blue gleams from bergs that silent ride In white enchantment the Antarctic tide.
A crystal chalice, filled with tinted wine, Whose every bubble sparkles with a new design, A dream of colour in a stone arrested And with a lovely permanence invested. A wondrous thought, that in primeval gloom Burst, like a blossom, into sudden bloom, A prophet's instinct, that 'mid chaos knew How suns would kiss a future drop of dew.
A need of light, which, focussed in the dark, Lit by suggestion this miraculous spark, Within whose matrix of strange fibres spun Is stored the secret essence of the sun. Was it some tincture ignorantly spilled Into earth's crucible? or did a skilled Alchemist pity on the fused mass take And, smiling, add it for its beauty's sake?
Mysterious as the spiritual flowers that flame Through human souls and passionately claim Kinship with beauty, incoherent as the gleams Of intuition in a poet's dreams, Yet eloquent of an unfailing source. And could we trace the deeply hidden course Of the beautiful to beauty, we might find The meaning of an opal and a human mind.