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Title: Question
Author: John Presland [
More Titles by Presland]
What of this gift of Life?
Passionate, swift, and rife
With pleasure or pain in the hand of the hurrying hours?
Oh little moment of space,
Oh Death's averted face,
How shall we grasp, shall we grasp what still is ours?
Chill, chill on either hand
Eternities must stand,
And pants between them, passionate and brief,
The moment's self, to make
Or unmake, but to take
Just here, just now, before death turns the leaf.
Ah, if the leaf but turn,
And if the soul discern
Another message on another page!
But if death shuts the book?
We may not know nor look;
We are fenced in upon a narrow stage;
While, splendid and intense,
Quick-strung in every sense
Life burns in us, and earth lies all around--
Far blue of summer seas,
Young green of age-old trees--
Bound by the season, by the horizon bound.
Oh colour, sound, and light,
Oh wondrous day and night,
Pale dawns, and evenings' splendid stretch of gold;
Keen beauty like a spear,
Half pleasure and half fear,
Goes through us for the things we may not hold.
Hot blood, hot noons, hot youth--
When Life seems all the truth,
And Death a mumbled far old fairy-tale;
When just the splendid days
Suffice our eager gaze,
The wondrous present that will never fail.
Then one day, with a fierce
Clamour of heart, we pierce
The light and see the shadows all behind,
And then, and not till then,
By the brief graves of men
The utter loveliness of flowers we find.
So little stretch of days,
And earth, with all her ways
Lovely enough, I think, for Paradise;
And body, mind, and heart,
Each separate complex part,
Wondrously made, and never quite made twice.
What of this gift of Life?
Shall it be worn in strife?
Shall it be idly spent, or idly stored?
Each for himself must dare
If the answer is here--or there,
Here for regret--or there for hope, O Lord?
[The end]
John Presland's poem: Question
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