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From “Charleston Poems”
THEY tell me she is beautiful, my city, | |
| That she is colorful and quaint; alone | |
| Among the cities. But I—I who have known | |
| Her tenderness, her courage, and her pity; | |
| Have felt her forces mold me, mind and bone, | 5 |
| Life after life, up from her first beginning— | |
| How can I think of her in wood and stone! | |
| To others she has given of her beauty: | |
| Her gardens, and her dim old faded ways; | |
| Her laughter, and her happy drifting hours; | 10 |
| Glad spendthrift April, squandering her flowers; | |
| The sharp still wonder of her autumn days; | |
| Her chimes, that shimmer from St. Michael’s steeple | |
| Across the deep maturity of June | |
| Like sunlight slanting over open water | 15 |
| Under a high blue listless afternoon. | |
| But when the dusk is deep upon the harbor, | |
| She finds me where her rivers meet and speak, | |
| And while the constellations gem the silence | |
| High overhead, her cheek is on my cheek. | 20 |
| I know her in the thrill behind the dark | |
| When sleep brims all her silent thoroughfares. | |
| She is the glamour in the quiet park | |
| That kindles simple things like grass and trees; | |
| Wistful and wanton as her sea-born airs, | 25 |
| Bringer of dim rich age-old memories. | |
| Out on the gloom-deep water, when the nights | |
| Are choked with fog, and perilous, and blind, | |
| She is the faith that tends the calling lights. | |
| Hers is the stifled voice of harbor bells, | 30 |
| Muffled and broken by the mist and wind. | |
| Hers are the eyes through which I look on life | |
| And find it brave and splendid. And the stir | |
| Of hidden music shaping all my songs, | |
| And these my songs, my all, belong to her. | 35 |
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