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Rh Of year or day the way it swung a door Forever off the latch, as if rude men Passed in and slammed it shut each one behind him For the next one to open for himself. I counted nine I had no right to count (But this was dreamy unofficial counting) Before I made the tenth across the threshold. Where was my supper? Where was anyone's? No lamp was lit. Nothing was on the table. The stove was cold—the stove was off the chimney— And down by one side where it lacked a leg. The people that had loudly passed the door Were people to the ear but not the eye. They were not on the table with their elbows. They were not sleeping in the shelves of bunks. I saw no men there and no bones of men there. I armed myself against such bones as might be With the pitch-blackened stub of an axe-handle I picked up off the straw-dust covered floor. Not bones, but the ill-fitted window rattled. The door was still because I held it shut While I thought what to do that could be done— About the house—about the people not there. This house in one year fallen to decay Filled me with no less sorrow than the houses Fallen to ruin in ten thousand years Where Asia wedges Africa from Europe. Nothing was left to do that I could see Unless to find that there was no one there And declare to the cliffs too far for echo "The place is desert and let whoso lurks In silence, if in this he is aggrieved, Break silence now or be forever silent.