The Earth Turns South/A Star Comes Singing

by Clement Richardson Wood

A STAR COMES SINGING

I.

The Earth Turns South

The earth turns south again.
Nipped by the sunless spaces, chilled and timorous,
She scuttles back toward the summer glow.

My life turns south again.
Rounding the venturesome sweep of thirty years,
Back on my orbit I go,
My eyes absorbing what lies beyond
In the untraveled cold spaces.
Once more the tender glow of summer for me,
And I shall turn north for the last time.

The circuit of the sun
Is a day to the sun, a year to me.
Yet there shall be sun years,
And an end of sun years.

II.

The Coming

In a desolate space between two distant stars
There is a stir:
An unquiet tremor shakes the emptiness,
A thin sound is born, and swells in stature
Until it is thunderous.

Now up the empty highroad of the suns
A sight—a faint and nebulous shimmer,
Clearing, growing into a huge and pallid moon,
Like a silver eye onrushing in the darkness,
Lit by its tiny cindery sun.

The sound grows vaster, heaven-filling.
The winds awake, pealing their hollow trumpeting,
Dizzying the senses.
Nearer and nearer the wheeling globe,
Sea flecked and hill roughened, dimpled with valleys,
Trailing its scarf of misty air.

It is here!
With a noise like a thousand cities falling together.

III.

Faces

As its huge bulk towers in passing
Faces peer from it, endlessly, endlessly,
Peering grayly, as out of prison bars.
The faces ache and haunt me.
King and ditchman, maiden and dreaming seer,
And my face, and your face, among them,—
Gray faces, endlessly peering.

Why do they look so gray, in the cloud-gray mists?
Do they brood on the journey's end?
Are their hearts ashen, their souls aging,
As time limps on his appointed way?

IV.

Restless Birth

O singing earth, O restless voyager of heavens,
There has been no rest in your turbulent journey.

After you ceased your flaming tumult,
Your chilled rocks writhed, grinding one another,
Tossing in your shaken sea.

Out of this fertile turmoil
They blossomed into blind life,
Driven by wind and tide;
They woke into plants, rooted, receptive,
Stretched into buoyant cleavers of the sea,
Darters through the sky,
And the more sensitive marvel, man:
All only your rocks alive, erect,
Your restless substance moving
Into a fiercer restlessness.

V.

The Primal Goads

Man is spawned of the restlessness of things.
He drinks, into body and mind,
The rocks, the rooted plants, the stirring animals,
Even his fellow men;
And at the same time he is absorbed by them.

He drives restlessly over earth's surface
Whipped by the primal goads—hunger, and love:
Hunger, that he may grow in stature,
Love, the itching call and response to other beings,
That two restless circling things
May unite, grow inert, grow restful forever.

Out of hunger have come vast fields and factories,
And belts of steel to bind the girth of the world;
Ships, cities, and markets, customs and sciences.
And ever with it, out of love, the home life,
Tenement room to spreading palace,
And songs and music, and all of love's sweet ways:
And out of both have grown
The final winter of civilizations,
The entomber, war.

Seared by these punishing whips
Romance has grown great and stately,
Art flings his iridescent glamor over dumb things,
Making them eloquent;
Glory comes, and a great light
Shining in men's eyes.

In icy and desolate space
Godlike forms are fantasied,
Mad Ashtoreth of love, and sea-spray Aphrodite,
Soft Ceres and staid Vesta for the humbler needs,
Red Mars, ice-locked Thor, heaven-thundering Jehovah.
There have been gentler gods and teachers—
Ingazing Buddha and lowly Jesus.
Lashed by these restless whips
Man even spans the threshold of the unspannable void,
Or clouds it with his wraith-like deities.

At last his calloused back is lashed no more.
He loses that fine crystallization,
Dissolves in the clear solution death,
And again is one with restless rock and soil.

VI.

The Crystal Life

Is life no more than this?
This flogged steed, pulling and twisting the unwieldy chariot of matter
With the coiling lashes of love and hunger
Sealing the naked back, and caking the uneven way
With its blackened blood?

Life is more than this, or any words.
Out of its simple seeds grows strange vegetation,
Sparse in the desert places, and upon the volatile sea,
Crowding and furring heavily the spots called cities.
And there are crossed and complex things,
Life ever growing out of itself
Toward a perfect crystal,
Then swiftly dissolving and recrystallizing:
What has been only guessed at,
What is, seen vaguely and deceivingly,
What will be, a flowering stupendous and unrealizable—
All out of the restless rock,
And into the restless rock returning.

VII.

Flower of the Dust

What a flower of the dust is man!
With eyes to see his mother earth, forever blind,
With ears to hear her song, who is deaf forever,
With lips to speak the word of the eternal dumb one.

Into far space reach the sightless chains
That swing earth spiraling on,
And the chains with which she swings the stars,
Even the largest and most radiant.
So toward the infinite space man's arms of light reach out,
Beholding, weighing: measuring, interpreting.

With ears and eyes he takes the undulant waves of energy,
And they stir him strangely: light and sound.
He dares to pilfer pitiful fragments of the reason of things,
This tiny piece claiming to understand
The limitless machine of which it is a part.

He builds cloudy religions and dizzy philosophies.
The spiraling earth climbs higher;
His dizzy structures topple, his clouds dissolve.

The earth is littered with his wrecks,
And the wrecks of the slower blunderers before him.
The shore of the future is reefed and breakered.
There will be no man-made craft
That shall ever pass its final reef.

What a flower of the dust is man!
Rock, given ears and eyes and feeling,
Dust made eloquent!
The dust would swell into clearer eyes, keener hearing,
A more melodious tongue.
In and out, blossom and decay,
And out of the decay blossoms again;
Until the rock and the dust decay,
Until the earth and the sun decay,
In their new turn to blossom again.

So the earth goes singing,
One with the tidal roll of the stars,—
Suns and their clustering planets,
Comets, and wilder vagrants of heaven,
Streaming onward forever.

VIII.

The Perfect Vision

Now as the chilly earth
Whirls past empty and desolate space,
The pallid faces of men
Peer from its prisoning surface.

To each is given some flashing vision
Of beauty or melody, or the final truth:
To some these come again and again.

Man cannot live too long on the high places;
Or the rock of which his body and soul are made
Would melt and dissolve again to lifeless rock.
So with the clearest man-crystal
The light flames, and then dims;
Love and coarse hunger resume their sway.
We pass unheeding into the hidden heart of beauty,
Beneath the silver altar of the stars,
Or in the fresh green shrine of the springtime;
We stand beside a soul at its whitest glow,
Blind and unperceiving.

To each man comes the vision,
And as it comes, it dulls.
But the vision has not gone.
Like moonlight pouring on tumbling waves,
Now one drop, and now another,
Glowing back the mellow splendor;
Or like a seething liquid, whose ever-shifting surface
Bursts into flame at the touch of the air,—
So comes the vision to men.
The man's glow dulls; the vision stays.

IX.

A Young God

I saw a young god, in a crowded corner of the heaven,
Carrying under his arm a graceful world,
As one might carry a cherished family pet
To the merciful chloroforming.

He was a handsome god, kindly and efficient,
And his soul ached at what he was about to do.
For he had poured his spirit into his world—
Love, and a craving for liberty,
And throat-tightening beauty, and many good gifts
Along with many that were evil.

But the time had come.
His world strayed bloodily too far;
It demanded too much of his spirit:
There was a bleak economy in heaven.
Lovingly and tenderly, he gave it all,
Babylon and Bethlehem, Ætna and polar sea,
Nero and Joan of Arc, Helen, Judas, and Jesus,
To merciful death.
A chilling cinder of a world
Scatters, eyeless and tongueless,
Through the field of dead stars.
Tomorrow the young god
Will go as his world has gone.

X.

Tomorrow

As the whirling globe spins upward
What new shifts will it see,
Before rock and dust decay,
And its spiral flight is stilled
In the breast of its mother, the sun?

Out of the blood-dewed past
Man yet may learn.
The odor of slaughtered blood
Has stained uncounted ages.
Will it learn the wonder of love,
Sole bringer of radiant joy
Over the blackened miles
And blackened hearts?

For love is the divinest selfishness,
The fullest and completest flowering
Of the dust-blossom, man.

Will cordial brotherhood find place among us,
That out of the equal human nebulæ
White stars of human light can rise unhindered?
Or will there be travail and oppression forever,
And hate forever, and blood forever?

XI.

Forest of Men

I too have blossomed for a day,
In the forest of men, of varying trees,
Stout wind-defying pines on open crags,
Shade-sheltering lowland trees,
Stunted trunks, storm-battered, or in crowded sunless hollows,
With flowering trees of men and women,
With trees of good and evil fruit, dead and living,
And woodland flowers of children.

I have been a tall and singing tree;
I have pushed my branches toward heaven;
The wind has scattered my pollen,
Has blown through my singing branches, and garnered my fruit.

The trees will die, and I among them;
Out of the rock arising, into the rock descending.

I shall not see what comes—
My scattering body and scattering soul
Will travel unguessed ways,
Never again assembling as one;
Each vibrant bit of me will speed on its way,
Filling its restless part in the earth's gray voyage.

XII.

Prayer

I pray, for me and for all men,
To that which sees and feels and knows,
The god that grows in me and all things living,
That I may stay as long as may be in the gleam:
That I may never lose the power to see,
Piercing through all cloudy fancies and delusions
Toward the shining core of truth outshining all things.

That I may never yield poison into the world.
That I may have my fill of food and love,
Living as I sing:
That those who know me and come after me,
The human blossoms of my human mating,
May carry further the torch, lift higher the song.

XIII.

The Passing

Now, in this desolate space between two distant stars,
The planet is passing,
With a noise like a thousand cities falling together.

Like spindrift caught in a foam-wake
The distant stars bend in behind it;
And pelting fragments of shattered worlds.
Sweep dizzily after.

Lessening, up the lofty highroad of the suns,
Dimming, stilling its piercing song,
It whirls into the starry distance.
Up its chill journey.

Pass on, up-spiraling earth!
What seeds you have, you will bring to fruitage;
O lonely, gray-misted wanderer,
Warmed by the dying glow of the sun,
Steered and steering to the hidden next end of things!