Ken

The town is old and very steep

    A place of bells and cloisters and grey towers,

And black-clad people walking in their sleep—

     A nun, a priest, a woman taking flowers

     To her new grave; and watched from end to end

     By the great Church above, through the still hours:

         But in the morning and the early dark

The children wake to dart from doors and call

Down the wide, crooked street, where, at the bend,

         Before it climbs up to the park,

Ken’s is in the gabled house facing the Castle wall.

 

When first I came upon him there

Suddenly, on the half-lit stair,

I think I hardly found a trace

Of likeness to a human face

     In his. And I said then

If in His image God made men,

Some other must have made poor Ken—

But for his eyes which looked at you

As two red, wounded stars might do.

 

He scarcely spoke, you scarcely heard,

His voice broke off in little jars

To tears sometimes. An uncouth bird

     He seemed as he ploughed up the street,

Groping, with knarred, high-lifted feet

     And arms thrust out as if to beat

          Always against a threat of bars.

 

     And oftener than not there’d be

     A child just higher than his knee

Trotting beside him. Through his dim

     Long twilight this, at least, shone clear,

     That all the children and the deer,

        Whom every day he went to see

Out in the park, belonged to him.

 

         “God help the folk that next him sits

         He fidgets so, with his poor wits,”

The neighbours said on Sunday nights

When he would go to Church to “see the lights!”

     Although for these he used to fix                                                          

     His eyes upon a crucifix

     In a dark corner, staring on

    Till everybody else had gone.

    And sometimes, in his evil fits,

You could not move him from his chair—

You did not look at him as he sat there,

     Biting his rosary to bits.

While pointing to the Christ he tried to say,

    “Take it away”.

 

     Nothing was dead:

He said “a bird” if he picked up a broken wing,

     A perished leaf or any such thing

     Was just “a rose”; and once when I had said

  He must not stand and knock there any more,

  He left a twig on the mat outside my door.

 

     Not long ago

The last thrush stiffened in the snow,

    While black against a sullen sky

       The sighing pines stood by.

But now the wind has left our rattled pane

To flutter the hedge-sparrow’s wing,

The birches in the wood are red again

       And only yesterday

The larks went up a little way to sing

       What lovers say

   Who loiter in the lanes to-day;

   The buds begin to talk of May

   With learned rooks on city trees,

        And if God please

       With all of these

We, too, shall see another Spring.

 

But in that red brick barn upon the hill

    I wonder—can one own the deer,

And does one walk with children still

        As one did here?

        Do roses grow

Beneath those twenty windows in a row—

        And if some night

When you have not seen any light

They cannot move you from your chair

        What happens there?

         I do not know.

 

       So, when they took

Ken to that place, I did not look

After he called and turned on me

His eyes. These I shall see—