Star over Bethlehem - Agatha Christie [31]
Things
Beauty
THE earth is Beauty and also longing;
Without desire and incompleteness
There is no Beauty.
Only the undreamt dream knows significance,
Only the vision we do not see has essential form;
Beauty is a vision imperfectly seen,
Beauty is the sound our ears hear only partly.
There is a stillness in the heart of sound.
Let me escape into that stillness
Which is Nothing and Everything;
Let me escape from the sharp pain of Beauty
For Beauty is a sword that pierces the heart;
Then shall I be the End and the Beginning,
Then shall I be Myself and Everyone
And also No one.
Beauty will not exist …
Beauty is here and now,
It is not hereafter …
The Water Flows
THE water flows
Peacefully along …
Under the trees
Like a song
Unsung.
Peacefully the water flows
Under the trees,
Brown water deep and cool,
Like beautiful words
That no one has said.
For the lips that might have spoken them
Are dead,
But the words are there still
In the stream,
Carried along
With the silent song …
Gentle winding stream
Under the trees,
You are like a dream
That might have been dreamt
But the dreamer awoke
Too soon …
The dream is here
In the stream,
Carried along
With the song
And the words
That are too lovely to be said.
The stream ripples and murmurs,
It talks as it flows,
But it is not the stream that I hear,
It is the deep dream and the song and the rhythm of beautiful words.
They are there
Under the trees
Flowing along …
O song,
O words,
O dream,
You do not only seem,
You are there in the deep reality of final peace.
The Sculptor
IN silence beauty will take form and grow …
In silence, in a dark place will beauty stand
Deathless—eternal—with an outstretched hand.
Soft! Do not frighten her—tread gently—so …
Pile up the lumps of sticky common clay,
Tools of your trade, tools that you understand,
Mould, shape and build with ever-loving hand,
Be swift—be swift—for beauty will not stay.
And at the end? The sculptured stone—who’ll buy?
Some rich man, proud of purse and flair;
“Fine piece of work! ’Twill give the place an air.”
How shall he understand your desperate sigh:
Not this, I saw—not this.
On rubbish heap, discarded clay says—Why?
I that once lived for beauty’s kiss
And now, discarded, on an ashpit lie.
So why?—I ask—
Why have I lived?
From me was beauty formed.
And now
Oh why—oh why?
A Wandering Tune
HAIR like a mist and eyes so wide apart and grey
That do not smile
But look far out as though they see
Once in a while
Things that Humanity,
The rank and file,
Shall never glimpse—they are so far away.
There in the crowded street they see
The desert sands and sometimes hear
An endless tune, now far, now near.
The piper pipes. The wandering tune
Floats out and upward to the moon
And stirs the palm trees in the breeze
And stirs the heart that listens yet …
Oh, wandering tune that wakes again
Forgotten longing and dead pain
And will not let the heart forget.
Oh, wandering tune
Beneath the moon,
Now far, now near—
That endless tune
Beneath the moon.
Places
Ctesiphon
SPEAK softly, let me sit and, dreaming, see
A golden arch uprising to the skies,
See it so clearly through my closed eyes
That, once again, I stand there quietly …
There, where Men built for glory, there shall be
Only bare beauty left, unheeding, wise,
Scornful of Midget Man who wars and dies,
Who builds and toils and suffers endlessly …
There shall remain at last the crumbling clay,
The loneliness of naked beauty bared,
The wild birds flying forth from sanctuary …
Let me remember one enchanted day …
And all the loveliness