The Sheep In The Ruins
for Learned and Augustus Hand
You, my friends, and you strangers, all of you,
Stand with me a little by the walls
Or where the walls once were.
The bridge was here, the city further:
Now there is neither bridge nor town—
A doorway where the roof is down
Opens on a foot-worn stair
That climbs by three steps into empty air.
(What foot went there?)
Nothing in this town that had a thousand steeples
Lives now but these flocks of sheep
Grazing the yellow grasses where the bricks lie dead beneath:
Dogs drive them with their brutal teeth.
Can none but sheep live where the walls go under?
Is man’s day over and the sheep’s begun?
And shall we sit here like the mourners on a dunghill
Shrilling with melodious tongue—
Disfiguring our faces with the nails of our despair?
(What dust is this we sift upon our hair?)
Because a world is taken from us as the camels from the man of Uz
Shall we sit weeping for the world that was
And curse God and so perish?
Shall monuments be grass and sheep inherit them?
Shall dogs rule in the rubble of the arches?
Consider, Oh consider what we are!
Consider what it is to be a man—
He who makes his journey by the glimmer of a candle;
Who discovers in his mouth, between his teeth, a word;
Whose heart can bear the silence of the stars— that burden;
Who comes upon his meaning in the blindness of a stone—
A girl’s shoulder, perfectly harmonious!
Even the talk of it would take us days together.
Marvels men have made, Oh marvels!—and our breath
Brief as it is: our death waiting—
Marvels upon marvels! Works of state—
The imagination of the shape of order!
Works of beauty—the cedar door
Perfectly fitted to the sill of basalt!
Works of grace—
The ceremony at the entering of houses,
At the entering of lives: the bride among the torches in the shrill carouse!
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poem by Archibald MacLeish
Added by Poetry Lover
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