He reached the graveyard, - grass, death, oblivion,- <br />He who had noticed how the world goes on. <br />It must have been a graveyard for dead ships. <br />He heard shrouds snarl under the wind's whips <br />Yet quietness unravelled from the grass. <br />He let his silence into that silence pass. <br />And shaped from air a cross among the birds <br />While the first tombstone let him read these words <br /> <br />'I did not die by chance but through the will <br />Of winds that found in me an easy kill. <br />They promised me safe anchor in my death, <br />Death in that anchorage : now they break faith. <br />The winds persist, and shipwreck underground. <br />New fears, not those I lost with life, resound. <br />Though slack with nothingness my buried forms <br />Are still judged worth their steerage through those storms. <br />Who blows the wind that makes my mainsails pout? <br />Why is a ship, once started, always out ? <br />I can say only that, without life, this hull <br />Plods sleeplessly, and misery bakes the skull. <br />For more than plain endurance none can pray, <br />But pray for me to Mary, traveller, pray.' <br /> <br />He plucked some leaves and gave them to the air, <br />Then knelt, and three times prayed that formal prayer.<br /><br />Boleslaw Lesmian<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-cemetery-6/
