The Dark Spring

And why do we care that tool or toy

Outlast their use, or find

This jar’s cheek shapelier that it was made

By hands long gone to tangled bone?

What is the comfort of these layered towns,

The sun upon long buried stones, heaved here,

Fallen just so from citadel?

Is it the echo of the fall, the new life,

The passage to our world, bearing a mark

That speaks a known name,

Saying that man’s work may leave a trace?

Is the king who drove or the slave who carved

The stone less dead? Amid what stench of butchery it fell!

How jumbled the signals of the few courses

That still in a wall’s order stand.

So many lived here, or near, at such a date (about),

That much seems clear, no more,

But the heart hurtles at the hint

Of a still flowing stream through rocks and veins.

Among these dregs of time a voice,

Coming through years like water through

Stone, carries the sharp brightness

The dark spring draws from the dark earth.

Just so did Herod’s workmen chip their noble stones,

Armies of slaves to make the gentle edge

His power imposed.

Just so did Jeremiah’s neighbors build

Their walls, of stones, from fields with sweat and groan

Extorted, and topped in tangled thorns,

To wait in strength the fruiting of the vine.