Authors: William Alexander Percy
On Sunday morning after mass
When he is dressed so fine,
He stops before their open doors,
But at night he comes to mine.
O Mary, bless all sailor lads
Whose loves are two and three,
But mine keep safe from other girls
—
Or let him die in the sea!
And as the last line leaves her lips
She pauses, puckers up her mild girl’s brow,
Then laughs a low contented laugh,
And sings again, half crooningly.
But summer sunshine, jubilant with cock-crows,
Is rattling open all the shuttered town.
The cross-roads gild, and housewives with their mops
Splash on the family door-step; street by street
Hears emptily the melancholy calls,
Reiterant and shrill, of country women,
Shoving their push-carts full of salad leaves
And gasping fish and lentils, frosty green.
Soon shore and beach and jetty are swarming and laughing
With fishermen’s wives and mothers
And fathers and children and friends,
Come down to welcome the fleet:
Old men with cautious, simple eyes
And polished wrinkles carved in wood,
Old women coiffed in white
With wide clean aprons, baskets on their arms,
And little boys with windy looks and sober ways,
Breeched and jumpered in mandarin sail-cloth —
All shuffling in wooden shoes
That clatter and thump on the cobbles —
And the girl at the end of the jetty
Among them and of them,
Laughing the laughter that hides.
At last the black line of the wind appears,
Dragging behind unevenly the fleet.
And instantly the shore is ruffled
With ant-hill runnings up and down,
And pointing hands and voluble, unheeded chatter.
But she is silent,
Clutching her shawl in the freshening breeze,
And pale — or pale as peasant girls may be —
For the fishing boats are returning
And the sailors return from the sea.
Moth after moth, gold-winged on the golden morning,
Bursting and drinking the light green spray of the tide,
They fly with flashing and splendor out of the ocean,
Straining for waters of calm and the haven they know.
As each ship rounds the mole with sail careening
The girl leans out,
Searching the weathered faces of the crew.
And now her lover’s boat flings past,
Wrapped in a dazzle of spray, dripping with brine,
Tilting its saffron sail in the rainbow wash
As it shoulders the mole.
Ah, the girl is a pendent flower!
Her mouth, her eyes, her soul,
Above him, gazing, waiting!
But he, forgetful, wrangles with the ropes,
And never lifts his head, nor waves his hand,
Nor sends one smile
Up to her eager face.
And the last late boat comes home,
And the fishing’s done,
And hulls are emptied of their freight —
Mauve and silver-scaled sardines —
And sails are furled
And in the quiet sunlight from the masts
The nets are hung to dry —
The sea-soaked azure nets,
Bluer than filaments of unflawed turquoise.
But the girl alone on the bright deserted jetty
Still stands in the staring sunshine,
Her warm breast leaned against the spray-damp coping
It leaned more warmly on when he passed by.
But now her head is crouched behind her arms,
Her shawl clutched to her mouth,
And out across the hazing sea her wide eyes stare
Unseeingly and full of fear.
And the ancient wind from Tristan’s isle comes sighing,
From the isle where long ago
Iseult with white hands folded on her lap,
Night after night,
Before the smouldering faggot fire,
Sat watching for some little tenderness
From Tristan,
Tristan the knight, whose heart to Cornwall clave
Unpityingly,
As all men know.
The river country’s wide and flat
And blurred ash-blue with sun,
And there all work is dreams come true,
All dreams are work begun.
The silted river made for us
The black and mellow soil
And taught us as we conquered him
Courage and faith and toil.
The river town that water oaks
And myrtles hide and bless
Has broken every law except
The law of kindliness.
And north and south and east the fields
Of cotton close it round,
Where golden billows of the sun
Break with no shade or sound.
Dear is the town, but in the fields
A little house could be,
If built with care and auspices,
A heart’s felicity.
O friend, who love not much indoors
Or lamp-lit, peopled ways,
What of a field and house to pass
Our residue of days?
We’d learn of fret and labor there
A patience that we miss
And be content content to be
Nor wish nor hope for bliss.
With the immense untrammelled sun
For brother in the fields,
And every night the stars’ crusade
Flashing to us their shields,
We’d meet, perhaps, some dusk as we
Turned home to well-earned rest,
Unhurried Wisdom, tender-eyed,
A pilgrim and our guest.
THE LOMBARDY POPLARS:
Captive in this drab alien land,
We dreamed of all the great and wise
Who took the roads our shadows spanned
With song on lips and sword on thighs.
King Richard fared, one morn of May,
Our leafy lane to Palestine
With Blondel following. Well-a-day,
They sang of God and love and wine!
We leaned to pity once that girl
Who left the Loire one dripping spring,
So red of mouth, so brown of curl,
To be love’s slave and Scotland’s king.
Crusaders, knights, and troubadours
Rode through our golden-panelled shade:
We never thought these songless shores
Could rival that dead cavalcade.
But, petulant of simple joys,
Loving Death’s mother, blind Romance,
We watched the passionate Delta boys
Stride down the street that leads to France.
THE CHINA-BERRIES:
Thousands of years ago,
We were weaving in moonlit Manchu gardens
Webs and arabesques of purple
On the moon-gray pebbled paths
For slender empresses,
In silver, lavender, and rose,
To tread on with their fuchsia-tinted sandals.
And one, on such a night,
Paused in our falling veils of subtle fragrance
And lifted up her arms
To the weary, much-prayed- to moon,
And wept for love.
But we have never seen these pale new people
Lift their arms to the exquisite moon
Or linger in our perfume.
They seem unconscious
Of the marvel of our blossoms,
Our stamens purpler-black than clematis,
Our delicate wisteria-tinged corolla.
Yet slender-fingered undulant princesses
Have bit their coral lips
And slain in anger
Prostrate imperial attendants
Because no loom could match our secret dyes.
Here we must tolerate small girls
With strange, sun-colored hair
Who thread our blossoms
And loop them with coarse clover-chains
About their throats.
Or worse, near summer-time,
Small boys, with eyes that have no darkness,
Will clamber into our branches,
Wounding our tender bark of satin,
Snapping our wonderful patterned leaves,
And pull our berries,
Hard, green, with infinitesimal speckles;
Then filling our indignant shade with laughter,
Jolly, uncouth, immoderate,
Mash them into their popguns
And frighten the sparrows even
And the reverent ancient negroes
With their insolent bombardment.…
Only the winter robins love us,
And then our boughs are naked,
And our shrivelled berries
Hang down in milky yellow clusters,
Fingered by faded winds,
Against a gray interminable sky.
Yet then too we are beautiful!
THE LOCUSTS:
In vain we fill the winter’s palms
With rush of round, thin, golden alms.
The winter has no care for us
But breaks our brittle branches thus,
Abjuring calms.
Yet one week of the year is ours:
We sun our creamy, scented flowers
And madden all the town. Oh, they
Are powerless, though prim, to stay
Our fragrant powers.
The crowded church we bloom before
Leaves carelessly an open door:
Young sinners’ eyes desert their books
And meet with long-lashed pagan looks
And read no more.
Ah, watch for them, when shadows wait,
Walking the levee, slow, sedate!
But blush to guess the darling sights
When perfumes are the only lights,
And it grows late.
THE WATER OAKS:
Once in our branches
Swarms of green parrakeets in seething turmoil settled,
Chattering north from the sweltering rank pampas,
Clothing us doubly in delightful leaves,
And suddenly departing.
But long ago, one violet spring,
We watched their wavering throngs melt down the south
To come again no more.…
We have been darkened by clouds of pigeons
Weltering like a cyclone
Across the watery rose sunset.
But some great death
Slew them: they come no more.…
More beautiful than all the wings that fly in beauty,
The wild swans,
Noble and full of fellowship,
Came in old days
Down the broad curves and brimming tremble of the river,
Or overland, at night, against the stars.
Oppressed with solemn joy
And ever-urgent purpose undisclosed,
They hovered in the twilight of cool autumn
Or mounted on the sunrise, trumpeting
And glad of rest, though brief.
For all their beauty
Each year we saw their glistening ranks dissolve,
Dissolve and waste, till now
Once in a winter and with pain
We spy perhaps a lone white wanderer,
Mateless and without friend,
Circling uncertainly and with hoarse piteous cries,
Till mercifully, with no thought of mercy,
The gray-eyed hunter on the river bars,
Making of murder sport, deprives
Him of his loneliness, the deep sky of a swan.
So too the races passed that lived beneath our leaves —
The patient, thought-pressed builders of the mounds
That came from mystery,
Returning whence they came;
The stealthy copper tribes
Whose arrows slit the blue beyond our heights,
Who, making moonlight haggard with their fires,
Danced in bad triumph at their brothers’ death,
But in the end found never a cause to dance.
So too shall pass their pallid conquerors
Who now in slaying us have made the land
Naked and without loveliness of shade.
Though they have planted seed where once we towered
And hemmed the river’s strength
And wedged us in their curveless hot-floored towns,
They too shall pass,
And we shall watch them die.
In the beginning there were three
And in the end there shall be only three:
The trees, the river,
And the outspread lonely tree of heaven,
Whose boughs are blossomy apple-wreaths at dawn,
Autumnal red and purple in the sunset,
And laden, night long, with the fruitage of the stars,
A harvest for some still-delaying husbandman.
I have seen Mary at the cross
And Mary at the tomb
And Mary weeping as she spread her hair
In a leper’s room.
But it was not in Bethany
Or groping up Calvary hill
I learned how women break their hearts to ease
Another’s ill.
Compassionate and wise in pain,
Most faithful in defeat,
The holy Marys I have watched and loved
Live on our street.
If I could be as calm as willow branches
When the sunlight turns them copper-pink and gold
And they lift their slender wands in the winter sunshine
From out the red-brown coffee-weeds into the blueness;
If I could know the calm of willow branches
When the hollows of the woods hold azure smoke
And the southern winter blurs and tarnishes;
If I could feel their passive unstrained certainty
As they wait the still-uneager, leaf-laden springtime,
Not fearing it will never come or come
Less beautiful, not doubting the return in time
Of downy buds and wrinkled burgeoning
And all the filmy lustre of warm days;
If I could be like willows by the river-bank in winter,
I think that wars remembered and presaged,
The drugging sense of doom and old disaster,
Would not oppress and strangle me as now.
But I should have a faith unflawed by these,
Discerning through the mad inclement now
The right’s august recurrence in the race,
And like the leafless willows by the river
Wait in the winter sunshine trustfully
And with a burnished calm.