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From “Southern April”
TREAD softly, softly, | |
| Scuffle no dust. | |
| No common thoughts shall thrust | |
| Upon this peaceful decay, | |
| This mold and rust of yesterday. | 5 |
| This is an altar with its incense blown away | |
| By the indifferent wind of a long, sad night; | |
| These are the precincts of the dead who die | |
| Unconquered. Haply | |
| You who haunt this place | 10 |
| May deign some gesture of forgiveness | |
| To those of our sundered race | |
| Who come in all humility | |
| Asking an alms of pardon. | |
| Suffer us to feel an ease, | 15 |
| A benefice of love poured down on us from these magnolia trees, | |
| That when we leave you we shall know the bitter wound | |
| Of our long mutual scourging healed at last and sound. | |
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| Through an iron gate, fantastically scrolled and garlanded, | |
| Along a path, green with moss, between two rows of high magnolia trees— | 20 |
| How lightly the wind drips through the magnolias; | |
| How slightly the magnolias bend to the wind. | |
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| It stands, pushed back into a corner of the piazza— | |
| A jouncing-board, with its paint scaled off, | |
| A jouncing-board which creaks when you sit upon it. | 25 |
| The wind rattles the stiff leaves of the magnolias: | |
| So may tinkling banjos drown the weeping of women. | |
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| When the Yankees came like a tide of locusts, | |
| When blue uniforms blocked the ends of streets, | |
| And foolish, arrogant swords struck through the paintings of a hundred years: | 30 |
| From gold and ivory coasts come the winds that jingle in the tree-tops; | |
| But the sigh of the wind in the unshaven grass, from whence is that? | |
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| Proud hearts who could not endure desecration, | |
| Who almost loathed the sky because it was blue; | |
| Vengeful spirits, locked in young, arrogant bodies, | 35 |
| You cursed yourselves with a vow: | |
| Never would you set foot again in Charleston streets, | |
| Never leave your piazza till Carolina was rid of Yankees. | |
| O smooth wind sliding in from the sea, | |
| It is a matter of no moment to you what flag you are flapping. | 40 |
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| Ocean tides, morning and evening, slipping past the sea-islands; | |
| Tides slipping in through the harbor, shaking the palmetto posts, | |
| Slipping out through the harbor; | |
| Pendulum tides, counting themselves upon the sea-islands. | |
| So they jounced, for health’s sake, | 45 |
| To be well and able to rejoice when once again the city was free, | |
| And the lost cause won, and the stars and bars afloat over Sumter. | |
| The days which had roared to them called more softly, | |
| The days whispered, the days were silent, they moved as imperceptibly as mist. | |
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| And the proud hearts went with the days, into the dusk of age, the darkness of death. | 50 |
| Slowly they were borne away through a Charleston they scarcely remembered. | |
| The jouncing-board was pushed into a corner; | |
| Only the magnolia-trees tossed a petal to it, now and again, if there happened to be a strong wind when the blooms were dropping. | |
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| Hush, go gently, | |
| Do not move a pebble with your foot. | 55 |
| This is a moment of pause, | |
| A moment to recollect the futility of cause. | |
| A moment to bow the head | |
| And greet the unconcerned dead, | |
| Denying nothing of their indifference, | 60 |
| And then go hence | |
| And forget them again, | |
| Since lives are lived with living men. | |
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