Page:The poems of Edmund Clarence Stedman, 1908.djvu/460

VARIOUS POEMS Thousands of years agone were chance and change,

Thousands of ages hence the same shall be;

Naught of thy joy and grief is new or strange:

Gather apace the good that falls to thee!

'T is all in a lifetime!

THE SKULL IN THE GOLD DRIFT

ho! dumb jester, cease to grin and mask it!

Grim courier, thou hast stayed upon the road!

Yield up the secret of this battered casket,

This shard, where once a living soul abode!

What dost thou here? how long hast lain imbedded

In crystal sands, the drift of Time's despair;

Thine earth to earth with aureate dower wedded,

Thy parts all changed to something rich and rare?

Voiceless thou art, and yet a revelation

Of that most ancient world beneath the new;

But who shall guess thy race, thy name and station,

Æons and æons ere these bowlders grew?

What alchemy can make thy visage liker

Its untransmuted shape, thy flesh restore,

Resolve to blood again thy golden ichor,

Possess thee of the life thou hadst before?

Before! And when? What ages immemorial

Have passed since daylight fell where thou dost sleep!

What molten strata, ay, and flotsam boreal,

Have shielded well thy rest, and pressed thee deep!

Thou little wist what mighty floods descended,

How sprawled the armored monsters in their camp,

Nor heardest, when the watery cyle ended,

The mastodon and mammoth o'er thee tramp.

How seemed this globe of ours when thou didst scan it?

When, in its lusty youth, there sprang to birth 430