Page:The poems of Richard Watson Gilder, Gilder, 1908.djvu/130

102 O, many a year ago, how many she cannot remember.

Now solemnly over the water rings out the evening hour.

And there in that very church,—tho', alas, how bedizened, and changed!

They've painted it up, she says, in their queer, new, modern fashion,—

There on a morning in June, she gave her hand to her husband;

Her heart it was his (she told him) long years and years before.

Now here she sits at the window, gazing out on steeple and hill;

All but the houses are gone,—the church, and the trees, and the houses;—

All, all have gone long since, parents, and husband, and children;

And herself—she thinks, at times, she too has vanished and gone.

No, it cannot be she who stood in the church that morning in June,

Nor she who felt at her breast the lips of a child in the darkness;

But hark in the gathering dusk comes a low, quick moan of anguish—

Ah, it is she indeed, who has lived, who has loved, and lost.

For she thinks of a wintry night, when her last was taken away,

Forty years this very month, the last, the fairest, the dearest;