Page:The Soul of a Century.djvu/142

  Within your family tomb  What? Will they let me? You are dead, and hatred only follows To the gates that lead to Hades. My beloved You would be moved to wonder now, to hear that one Should dare to question the right to bury you, You! Emperor! The Lord of men! Their ruler. Yes, that will be your final service Akte, The final means of serving your former master, The final homage, offered by a flower To her lifeless sun, and after that Poor Akte? Is there for you an “After?”

Within Caesarea’s proud castle tower King Herod sat, his head in palms reclining. The king, a weary wasted man whose life By many ills was being undermined.

Westwardly racing, sped the crimson sunset Into the waves that bear the blood red ring To the tower’s base The King just turned his head, For painful is this light to tired eyes, And he gazes across the stretching Plain of Sharon.

His gaze first fell upon Gerizim’s summit, And thence, like one infirm with age, it stole Across Sebastia, to Bethel, and Then further yet, to distant Antipatris. A few steps more it dragged and then stood still Steeped in the verdant sea. How near now seem Its waves! The tops of palms and olives, The crooked sycamores and tetrabinths with their naked Bark-free bodies, the pastures’ buoyant grasses All swelled and raised, all helter-skelter rushing Toward the bluish mountain-tops that eastward rise. Those golden islands bathing in this ocean, Fields rich with crops, around them endless fences Of mighty cactus, full of crimson blossoms As if besmeared with blood just freshly shed. And over all, a reddish light is playing Like a bloody dust