What's O'Clock/Folie de Minuit

by Amy Lowell

FOLIE DE MINUIT

No word, no word, O Lord God!
Hanging above the shivering pillars
Like thunder over a brazen city.

Pity? Is there pity?
Does pity pour from the multiform points
Of snow crystals?
If the throats of the organ pipes
Are numb with cold,
Can the boldest bellows' blast
Melt their now dumb hosannas?

No word, august and brooding God!
No shrivelled spectre of an aching tone
Can pierce those banners
Which hide your face, your hands,
Your feet at whose slight tread
Frore water curds to freckled sands
Seaweed encrusted.
The organ loft is draughty with faint voices
Weeping,
Which are not mine, nor would be.
I purposed anthems, copper-red and golden,
Thrusting to the hearts of Babylonian Kings,
Bowed down before Judea and its Highest,
That God of Hosts who screens himself with banners.
My finger-tips are cast in a shard of silence;
The wormy lips of these great, narrow tunnels, the pipes,
Are choked with silence;
The banners, the banners, are brittle with decay
And rusted out of colour.

The candles gutter in their sconces,
Curling long welts of evil-smelling smoke about my head.
The organ's voice is dead,
Or is it mine?
The banners flap
Like palls upon a bier
On windy midnight burials
Where torches flare a glittering imposture
About the loneliness of violated sod
Gashed open for a grave.

Pity me, then,
Who cry with wingless psalms,
Spellbound in midnight and chill organ pipes.
Above my eyes the banners bleed
Their dripping dust-specks,
Proclaiming the gaunt glories of successful battles.
It would enchant me to see you afloat behind them,
Blown for a moment to an eye-catch.
But who are you to come for frozen hallelujahs!

And yet I go on silently playing.