THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR

My daughter recently passed on to me from my sister a copy of the literary magazine I edited at the college I attended when I went to England at the age of 18, containing a poem I had forgotten, that I wrote under the influence of Archibald Macleish's poem "You, Andrew Marvell". You might find it amusingly pessimistic, but I think it not bad for an adolescent stab at historical Weltschmerz:

THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR

The force that wraps in ice the outworn fall
Drives ever west a shadow on the land,
Muffles the early murmur round the Sphinx,
Urges the quiet crawl of artless moss
Into the Parthenon.
With dust it fills the wheel ruts, dries the blood
Within the Coliseum, snaps the head
From unlamented Juno, scars with weeds
The drooping Palatine.

THe triremes rot in fifty sunless fathoms
Of the Aegean. The cross of Christ
Has joined as feeble smoke Jerusalem's skies.
Raphael's brush, Michelangelo's chisel
Are ash and dust beneath your halting feet,
Yourself a ghost grown old.

Look there behind you. The shadow nears.
Your thought, your art fall slowly by your grave;
The grandson cannot see them through the night.