Rumbled like trundled drums,

The river's voice,

The mile-deep thunder-
Speak very soft, speak low;

This is a place of wonder!

Tread very soft-tread slow

For here black roses grow
In ground unholy,
Flowers of darkness

That have sought the light,
One blue-leafed seedling

From the world below

Of night and shadowy trees and voiceless birds,
Of vast, dim meadows and of monstrous herds-
Petals of midnight which are come

To prophesy against the sun,

With seed pods dangerous to all things bright,
Dull blossoms from the tree of melancholy.

Lean very low-lean low

To hear from dreamer's lips

How fiendishly appears

A webb-foot being at the mouth of hell

To prune the ebon rose with leaden shears;

And how that demon strews

Jet petals round the dreamer once, and twice
Cupped like the sloughed scales of an asp,

And bears the dreamer's soul down cavern roads,
Cold, in a damp-smooth clasp.

He bears the dreamer's soul asleep;

He bears the swarthy roses deep

Deep down the pounding cataracts,
Along the river hurled

Through leafless tracts

Within a starless world,

Into a city drowned

With shadows drooping down

From balconies of blindness

In the murky town.

Signals of flapping blackness float

In folds of darkness from the walls,
And a gigantic watchman rests

His bony hands upon a drum,

Waiting for sunrise that will never come;
The eyeless serpents rustle in the moat;
And silence calls.

Then where the dead waters flow

Down to the last pit below

There is a noise of boulder stones,

Cast up by blurting fountains;

Washed down the cataracts with grumbling tones,

That rumble dismally among the subterranean mountains.

And down the crags

Along whose face

The grey clouds hang

Like rags in space

The cowled dreams sit

And listen to the thunder, thunder, thunder

Of the black river and the stones.

Tread very soft-speak low.

This is a place of wonder.

WILD GEESE

BY JOSEPH AUSLANDER

Only the other night, it seems, I saw the wild geese trekking
In a black lanky wedge across the moon,

Their sharp frost-silvered wings flecking

The zenith.

. . And now in a fever of harsh maroon,

Burnt scarlet and tarnished bronze, the great groundwhirl

Of leaves twists to a frenzied skirl

From autumnal pipes, the dervishes of brilliant blinding death
Shuddering, weaving, spinning-faster and fiercer-without breath!

Oh that last rich barbaric dizziness, the smoke of pearl,

The crimson axes of the heat hissing through,

The final lividly exultant blue

Crackle of dust!—and then the acrid silence and the hard green glitter of hoar-dew.

Only the other night, it seems, only the other night

You passed with the passing of familiar light
From the sky and a certain hill: Oh, at your dying
There was a sound of wild geese crying, crying;
There was a sound of leaves that give up trying
To glow; and all wild beauty drifting, shifting
South, interminably south!

But I cannot give up remembering your swiftly quiet hands and the halffrightened hint of peace over your eyes, your mouth.

LAST NIGHT IN MARCH

BY BERENICE K. VAN SLYKE

The night is filled with shy new-venturings,
Winds unused to the miracle of wings;
Flutter and swirl, a sudden swift retreat,
And silence where were now impetuous feet.
Slow shadowhands stealing about my eyes;
Almost the winds break out in little cries,-
So sweet to be an almost-April breath.

In some brown pool, where daylight lingers still
About the hidden face of daffodil,

The frogs start thinly piping to the spring
An arrowy wisp of song; and when winds bring
That alien note past each unhearing leaf
I feel a melancholy joy in grief,-

So sweet would be an almost-April death.