You have dethroned the ancient God, You have usurped his Sabbath, his common days; Yea, every moment is delivered to you, Our Temple, our Eternal, our one God! Our souls have passed into your eyes, Our days into your hair; And you, our rose-deaf prison, are very pleased with the world, Your world. GOD In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned! His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls: The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power, On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry, He lay—a bullying hulk—to crush them more; But when one fearless turned and clawed like bronze, Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws, And he would weigh the heavier on those after. Who rests in God’s mean flattery now? Your wealth Is but his cunning to make death more hard, Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking; And he has made the market for your beauty Too poor to buy although you die to sell. Only that he has never heard of sleep, And when the cats come out the rats are sly, Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn. But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots, And in the morning some pale wonder ceases. Things are not strange; and strange things are forgetful. Ah! If the day were arid, somehow lost Out of us; but it is as hair of us, And only in the hush no wind stirs it, And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes, And restlessness still shadows the lost ways. The fingers shut on voices that pass through Where blind farewells are taken easily. Ah, this miasma of a rotting God! SLEEP Godhead’s lip hangs When our pulses have no golden tremors, And his whips are flicked by mice And all star-amorous things. Drops, drops of shivering quiet Filter under my lids. Now only am I powerful. What though the cunning gods outwit us here In daytime and in playtime, Surely they feel the gyves we lay on them In our sleep. O, subtle gods lying hidden! O, gods with your oblique eyes! Your elbows in the dawn, and wrists Bright with the afternoon, Do you not shake when a mortal slides Into your own unvexed peace? When a moving stillness breaks over your knees (An emanation of piled æons’ pressures), From our bodies flat and straight, And your limbs are locked, Futilely gods, And shut your sinister essences? MY DAYS