Seashore

Over her great museum of lost nations

Where the green vision of the drowned behold

A fantasy of prow and sunk sequoia,

'The rotary windows of the ocean rolled

To where the extended redheads, one by one,

Were stripping their almond torsos to the sun.

With pails of pictured tin, beneficent tots

Lay ditch and fortress, civilize the sand,

Retreat as blue Cassandras of the wave

Promise the future of whatever land.

Here fathers loll, their wizard shoulders bent,

Dreaming the Sangreals of assured percent.

The old lay out their faded veins to suck

Thin vigor from the clinics of the sun;

The widow trim in crimson waits, would trade

All her new seasons for one older one.

Her yesterdays run by with lighted lips;

She lies, their sad tomorrow, with fat hips.

Girls seventeen, their flesh wiser than they,

In two bright thongs worry the blue police,

Traverse serene the ordeal of the sky,

Lips sainted-little wings of dime cerise.

And shading the silver porches of the soul

Immortal flora over the forehead roll.

By cord from heaven hung, such pens are writing

Bright comment on the margin of the seas,

That never turn to look. Their hanging gardens

Are rich with many a fairer limb than these,

Not locked in land by key of any spade:

The fortunate dead, in country waters laid.