Poems (Tree)/Starlight Silences

by Iris Tree

STARLIT silences!Breeding fears, swarming with sudden deaths,With separations, burdens, and despairs,Weaving slow eerie fancies in my brain . . .Forlorn shorn monks go down the cloisters of quietnessWith tortured crucifixes cut in ivoryClasped in their praying hands,And psalmed with lips renunciate of kisses . . .Forgotten days are painted on the nightIn parables and symbols of remorseThat jeer from out the wind-stirred tapestries.The hangman's rope coils upward like a snakeOut of the death-coloured waters,While the black barges passFunereal,Carrying doom from mist to mist. . . .And madmen steal about the wintry parksUnder the high glum walls of an asylum,With eyes lit up in phosphorescent ecstasies,With fumbling hands.That grope for things invisibly obscene.Even the clockGrown idiot too from keeping madmen's timeGibbers the hours away in irrelevant chimes. . . .Silence embalms the dead with scented bandsAnd is the watchman to deserted houses,And draws the violet curtain on the day,And fits a mask of silver to the moon.Silence brings corpses from the crypts of memoryAnd sits them round us in the empty chairs,Opens the secret chambers of our hopesAnd shows us there in awful pantomimeLust wreathing love with poppies and with ashes,And Beauty dressing Sin for carnival,And Peace made drunken with a cup of blood.It winds as ivy round our listening thoughts Shutting all sounds away, enclosing usWithin its stifled virid twilight. . . .

Cry out, sing, make noises,Bacchantes, revellers, clowns!Bring myriad lamps in clusters, likening grapesThat spill the wine of light into our gloom;Pressing against our lipsThe red grape-kisses of pleasure.Bring the hounds,The garlanded white ones,To bay and snarl and tear the flying ragsOf stillness shadowing away!Lean over me, O Life,And whisper all thy lying flatteriesThat drag me back from Silence and her dead.I have kept vigil on my soul too longWithin this vast cathedral of dim sleep,Languidly gatheringThe cold grey lilies of the starsTo slip between her passive waxen hands. . . .

1918