“Or rankles still the bitter jibe Of fool and Pharisee, When angels wept that England’s law Had nailed you to the Tree, When from her brow she tore the rose Of golden minstrelsy?” Then spake the ghost of Oscar Wilde While shrill the night hawk cried: “Sweet singer of the race that bare Him of the Wounded Side, (I loved them not on earth, but men Change somehow, having died). “In Pere La Chaise my head is laid, My coffin-bed is cool, The mound above my grave defies The scorn of knave and fool, But may God’s mercy save me from The Psychopathic School! “Tight though I draw my cerecloth, still I hear the din thereof When with sharp knife and argument They pierce my soul above, Because I drew from Shakespeare’s heart The secret of his love.... “Cite not Krafft-Ebing, nor his host Of lepers in my aid, I was sufficient as God’s flowers And everything He made; Yea, with the harvest of my song I face Him unafraid. “The fruit of Life and Death is His; He shapes both core and rind....” Cracked seemed and thin the golden voice, (The worm to none is kind), While through the graveyard of Montmartre Despairing howled the wind. THE PARROT O bird grotesque and garrulous, In green and scarlet liveried, Thy ceaseless prattle hides from us The secret of thy dream indeed. But in thine eyeball’s mystic bead Are mirrored clear to them that read Vague, nameless longings, like the breed Of some exotic incubus. Where is thy vision? Overseas? In some bright tropic far-off land Where chiding simians in tall trees Swing by luxurious breezes fanned, While at fantastic phallic feasts Brown women uncouth idols hail, And through the forest sounds the wail Of the fierce matings of wild beasts? Or are thine other memories, Of other lives on other trees, Encasements in some previous flesh In far-off lost existences? For, as the tiger leaves his spoor Upon the prairie, firm and sure Life writes itself upon the brain, The soul keeps count of loss and gain, And in the vibrant, living cells Of the small parrot’s brain there dwells A sparkle of the flame benign That makes the human mind divine. The self-same Life-Force fashions us: Its writings are the stars on high, Its transient mansions thou as I. Through Plato’s mouth it speaks to us, Through the earth’s vermin even thus. The heaving of a baby’s breast And the gyrations of the sun To its omnipotence are one And make its meaning manifest.