. . . and the children's teeth shall be set on edge. <br /> <br />I see him old, trapped in a burly house <br />Cold in the angry spitting of a rain <br />Come down these sixty years. <br /> <br />Why vehemently <br />Astride the threshold do I wait, marking <br />The ice softly pendent on his broken temple? <br />Upon the silence I cast the mesh of rancor <br />By which the gentler convergences of the flesh <br />Scatter untokened, mercilessly estopped. <br /> <br />Why so illegal these tears? <br /> <br />The years' incertitude and <br />The dirty white fates trickling <br />Blackly down the necessary years <br />Define no attitude to the present winter, <br />No mood to the cold matter. <br /> <br />(I remember my mother, my mother, <br />A stiff wind halted outside, <br />In the hard ear my country <br />Was a far shore crying <br />With invisible seas) <br /> <br />When tomorrow pleads the mortal decision <br />Sifting rankly out of time's sieve today, <br />No words differently will be uttered <br />Nor stuttered, like sheep astray. <br /> <br />A pauper in the swift denominating <br />Of a bald cliff with a proper name, having words <br />As strumpets only, I cannot beat off <br />Invincible modes of the sea, hearing: <br /> <br />Be a man my son by God. <br /> <br />He turned again <br />To the purring jet yellowing the murder story, <br />Deaf to the pathos circling in the air.<br /><br />Allen Tate<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-pauper/
