Poor girl, inhabitant of a strange land

Where death stares through your gaze,

As though a distant moon

Shone through midsummer days

With the skull-like glitter of night:

Poor child, you wear your

summer dress

And your shoes striped with gold

As the earth wears a variegated cover

Of grass and flowers

Covering caverns of destruction over

Where hollow deaths are told.

I look into your sunk eyes,

Shafts of wells to both our hearts,

Which cannot take part in the lies

Of acting these gay parts.

Under our lips, our minds

Become one with the weeping

Of the mortality

Which through sleep is unsleeping.

Of what use is my weeping?

It does not carry a

surgeon's knife

To cut the wrongly

multiplying cells

At the root of your life.

It can only prove

That extremes of love

Stretch beyond the flesh

to hideous bone

Howling in hyena dark alone.

Oh, but my grief is thought,
a dream,

Tomorrow's gale will

sweep away.

It does not wake every day

To the facts which are and

do not only seem:

The granite facts around

your bed,

Poverty-stricken hopeless

ugliness

Of the fact that you will soon

be dead.