HARVEST-MOON
by: Josephine Preston Peabody
- MOON, slow rising, over the trembling sea-rim,
- Moon of the lifted tides and their folded burden,
- Look, look down; and gather the blinded oceans,
- Moon of compassion.
- Come, white Silence, over the one sea pathway:
- Pour with hallowing hands on the surge and outcry,
- Silver flame; and over the famished blackness,
- Petals of moonlight.
- Once again, the formless void of a world-wreck
- Gropes its way through the echoing dark of chaos;
- Tide on tide, to the calling, lost horizons,
- One in the darkness.
- You that veil the light of the all-beholding,
- Shed your tidings down to the dooms of longing,
- Down to the timeless dark; and the sunken treasure,
- One in the darkness.
- Touch, and harken--under the shrouding silver,--
- Rise and fall of the heart of the sea and its legions
- All and one; -- one with the breath of the deathless,
- Rising and falling.
- Touch and waken, so, to a far hereafter,
- Ebb and flow, the deep, and the dead in their longing:
- Till at last, on the hungering face of the waters,
- There shall be light.
- (Light of Light, give us to see, for their sake.
- Light of Light, grant them eternal peace;
- And let Light perpetual shine upon them,--
- Light, everlasting.)
- Moon of the lifted tides and their folded burden,