Finale - Pablo Neruda

Matilde, years or days
sleeping, feverish,
here or there,
gazing off,
twisting my spine,
bleeding true blood,
perhaps I awaken
or am lost, sleeping:
hospital beds, foreign windows,
white uniforms of the silent walkers,
the clumsiness of feet.

And then, these journeys
and my sea of renewal:
your head on the pillow,
your hands floating
in the light, in my light,
over my earth.

It was beautiful to live
when you lived!

The world is bluer and of the earth
at night, when I sleep
enormous, within your small hands.

Pablo Neruda

From One Who Stays - Amy Lowell

How empty seems the town now you are gone!
A wilderness of sad streets, where gaunt walls
Hide nothing to desire; sunshine falls
Eery, distorted, as it long had shone
On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone.
The whir of motors, stricken through with calls
Of playing boys, floats up at intervals;
But all these noises blur to one long moan.
What quest is worth pursuing? And how strange
That other men still go accustomed ways!
I hate their interest in the things they do.
A spectre-horde repeating without change
An old routine. Alone I know the days
Are still-born, and the world stopped, lacking you.


Amy Lowell

A Pageant of Elizabeth - Rudyard Kipling

Written for "The Pageant of Parliament," 1934


Like Princes crowned they bore them--
Like Demi-Gods they wrought,
When the New World lay before them
In headlong fact and thought.
Fate and their foemen proved them
Above all meed of praise,
And Gloriana loved them,
And Shakespeare wrote them plays!
. . . . . . .
Now Valour, Youth, and Life's delight break forth
In flames of wondrous deed, and thought sublime---
Lightly to mould new worlds or lightly loose
Words that shall shake and shape all after-time!

Giants with giants, wits with wits engage,
And England-England-England takes the breath
Of morning, body and soul, till the great Age
Fulfills in one great chord:--Elizabeth!


Rudyard Kipling

Silent Steps - Rabindranath Tagore

Have you not heard his silent steps?
He comes, comes, ever comes.

Every moment and every age,
every day and every night he comes, comes, ever comes.

Many a song have I sung in many a mood of mind,
but all their notes have always proclaimed,
`He comes, comes, ever comes.'

In the fragrant days of sunny April through the forest path he comes,
comes, ever comes.

In the rainy gloom of July nights on the thundering chariot of clouds
he comes, comes, ever comes.

In sorrow after sorrow it is his steps that press upon my heart,
and it is the golden touch of his feet that makes my joy to shine.


Rabindranath Tagore