DuBose Heyward

HIGH on the mountain where the storm-heads are,

Lying where all may see, there is a place

As hideous and shocking as a scar

That mars the beauty of a well-loved face.

Infinitely drear, and raw, and nude,

It waits and listens in the solitude.

There is no friendly tree in all that square

Of scattered stones and arid, troubled clay.

Bleak as the creed of those who journey there,

Hard as the code by which they lived their day,

It gives them all they ask of it—its best;

No beauty and no softness—only rest.

But oh, the pity of it all is this:

They lived with beauty and their eyes were blind.

Dreaming of far strong joys, they came to miss

Those that were near. So at the last we find

No tenderness of blossom, but instead

Mute emblems of the longings of the dead.

These rain-bleached sea-shells in an ordered row

Tell of an ocean that they never knew

Except in dreams which, through the ebb and flow

Of years, set seaward as the torrents do.

Always they planned to follow, knowing deep

Within their hearts that dreams are but for sleep.

And see these tawdry bits of broken glass

Which speak the foreign glories of the town—

The crowds, the lights; these too are dreams that pass

Here where the hemming walls of rock look down,

And clasp their children fast within their keep

Until they cradle them at last to sleep.

Yet all the while if they could only know

The beauty that is theirs to breathe and touch—

The whisper of the dawn across the snow,

The vast low-drifting clouds that love them much—

Oh, they could call their dreams home down the sky,

And carry beauty with them when they die.