The Lost Cemetery

As I crossed a pathless wilderness I found this lonely spot,
‘Tis a place of human burial where the very stones seem ?;
At the west walled in by an arrogant cliff with its rusty jaws agape
Like a ? from the sea-deep risen, by a gorgon turned to stone.
The sea, with its drifting sand-dunes, and the tramp of its turbulent army,
Holds well the southward entrance to this camp of dissolution,
On the north thick-huddling junipers display their vandal hordes;
Attacking or defending they invade the unguarded field;
A stagnant pool lies festering in the slime of its own decay,
And a thousand blunted lance-heads nod over its shallow border,
As if to shield the eastern flank of this bivouac of the dead.
Where the sharp-toothed sedges bite the wind, and the wind like a fretted hound
Bites back at the transit traveler led on by the resonant waves.

Here Silence and Solitude reign alone, except for the murmuring sea
And sheep, from the hillside pastures, come to feed o’er forsaken graves,
Whey they trample the fallen tomb and stones, defacing the records of love—
Or sleep serenely unconscious of the sleeping dust below,
While the careless lambs leap merrily o’er the cradles of silent Babes!
Where now are the Lovers who made these stones their book of remembrance?
Themselves forgotten, could they forget these histories graven in tears>
Where are the Fathers who wept over sons, who were first at the goal of mortality?
The Mother who fain would have slept below with the dead in this virginal slumber—
But that Life, more remorseless than death, compelled them to hear their bereaval!
Ah! have they forgotten the loves that the prostrated marble remembers?
Or, wandered afar in alien lands, have they sunk into alien graves
With none to snatch from oblivion the names here crumbling, deserted?

The birch-trees, graceful and slender, in love with forsaken places,
Come stealthily in to shelter these desecrated graces;
And down through the sunken mould, to the ashes that sleep forgotten,
Send the long, attenuate threads of their lithe roots, to bring back
Their dust into loving sunshine with the warm, sweet sap for blood?—
That these may not seem so lost in their utter desolation!

The neighboring sea hath an anthem, an everlasting dirge
To the widowed whose thoughts are murmurs in the solemn march of life,
But a high blast of victory to the Love that has conquered death?
The winds from the long sand beaches, sent shrilling across the lea,
Are the wailing of ghosts that wander above this midnight eternal[?]
To spirits of doubt and denial, self-doomed to their withering desert;
In ears laid lovingly close to the Mother heart of Nature
They seem the great, keen breath of the Infinite Giver of Life.

The noon day trill of the locust with its swift, incessant jar
Seems only articulate Silence, the mute graves’ voicelessness!
The Osprey comes from his fishing and sits on a leaning headstone,
Devouring his prey, then away with a scream to his boundless possession!
The great Grey Gull in the offing cries out like a drowning seaman,
Then into a mocking laugh he turns his mimicry of terror.
The blackbirds whistle and chatter as if no grave were below them,
And Bobolink’s tipsy roundel is the veriest scorn of sadness,
Of the myriad lives that somewhile drift over this field of ruin
There is no one conscious of death but the human neglecting the dead.

All voices join in the chorus that Nature prepares for the sleepers
But ever they sleep unremembered forsaken of love and the living,
Should, haply, their spirits return from the wonderful realm of the ??
To visit the region once sacred, now sunken in dull desecration
What solace could save them from sadness, beholding their ashes deserted?
Ah, trust me! surrendered mortality drops every pang of the mortal!
And faithful finds in all being the pulse of the definite Being!
The breath of the measureless Ocean proclaims this its gospel of Power.
A whisper of love from the mosses that tenderly carpet this grave
Assures them how motherly Nature forgets not her slumbering babes,
Stealing silently in to spread o’er them her beautiful mantle of verdure;
If lovers and kindred forsake them they lie in her arms unforsaken;
The Father of all hath for all of his children this beautiful Nurse!