The Ball
How do we see our world—
Formless? Vague?
A rude sphere hurled through space?
A green kaleidoscope of trees,
And the flash of seas?
And life and movement in every place?
I see my world with color wet;
With the golden sap
Pushing the green to the ardent sky.
I see the ripeness, the warmth of fruits,
Round to the sun, plumed melody,
The clasp and the subtleties of roots;
I see gods walk on the morning hills,
Up the dappled brooks and the secret lanes
And vistas leading to ferny haunts,
Where the vivid crimson cardinal flaunts
In calm of tree-pillared fanes.
I see my world star-fretted, caught
In the web of enchained eternities—
With the age-old moon on her stair, cloud wrought,
Climbing the night-sky’s precipice;
I see the silver wheel of tides,
The night spell hid in the forest breast,
The gold splashed dawn that gravely glides
Over grey mountain crest.
O World, whirling out with the sun,
And holding us, everyone,
When the golden skies twilighted lean
To the purple hills—What have they seen,
Who were born, still blind, in a web of days,
To thy lessons written in simple ways?
Dull streets choked with dusty forms?
Crowds and houses and groups and swarms
Who strive, and lose, and are gone again?
A world of sordid women and men?
A crowd of petty and dull and mean?
Not a flower face nor a splash of green—
Unless—O world, they have seen it all—
The miracle of thy Wonder-Ball!