Advise to a Prophet

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,Not proclaiming our fall but begging usIn God’s name to have self-pity,Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,The long numbers that rocket the mind;Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,Unable to fear what is too strange.Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.How should we dream of this place without us?ÑThe sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,A stone look on the stone’s face?Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceiveOf an undreamt thing, we know our costHow the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,How the view alters. We could believe,If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slipInto perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,The jack-pine lose its knuckled gripOn the cold ledge, and every torrent burnAs Xanthus once, its gliding troutStunned in a twinkling. What should we be withoutThe dolphinÕs arc, the dove’s return,These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?As us, prophet, how we shall callOur natures forth when that live tongue is allDispelled, that glass obscured or brokenIn which we have said the rose of our love and the cleanHorse of our courage, in which beheldThe singing locust of the soul unshelled,And all we mean or wish to mean.Ask us, ask us whether the worldless roseOur hearts shall fail us; come demandingWhether there shall be lofty or long standingWhen the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.