When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, <br />Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, <br />Not proclaiming our fall but begging us <br />In God's name to have self-pity, <br /> <br />Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range, <br />The long numbers that rocket the mind; <br />Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind, <br />Unable to fear what is too strange. <br /> <br />Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race. <br />How should we dream of this place without us?-- <br />The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us, <br />A stone look on the stone's face? <br /> <br />Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive <br />Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost <br />How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost, <br />How the view alters. We could believe, <br /> <br />If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip <br />Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy, <br />The lark avoid the reaches of our eye, <br />The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip <br /> <br />On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn <br />As Xanthus once, its gliding trout <br />Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without <br />The dolphin's arc, the dove's return, <br /> <br />These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? <br />Ask us, prophet, how we shall call <br />Our natures forth when that live tongue is all <br />Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken <br /> <br />In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean <br />Horse of our courage, in which beheld <br />The singing locust of the soul unshelled, <br />And all we mean or wish to mean. <br /> <br />Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose <br />Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding <br />Whether there shall be lofty or long standing <br />When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.<br /><br />Richard Wilbur<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/advice-to-a-prophet/
