Momus

Momus is the name men give your face,

The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle

Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,

Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray Against horizons purple, silent.

Yes, Momus,

Men have flung your face in bronze

To gaze in gargoyle downward on a street-whirl of folk.

They were artists did this, shaped your sad mouth,

Gave you a tall forehead slanted with calm, broad wisdom;

All your lips to the corners and your cheeks to the high bones

Thrown over and through with a smile that forever wishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all the iron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, gone into dreams, by God.

I wonder, Momus,

Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look with deep laughter

On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known, solemn repetitions of history.

A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from your kindliness of bronze,

You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple, silent;

Granite shoulders heaving above the earth curves,

Careless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and women

Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil, the salt of tears,

And blood drops of undiminishing war.