Family Ghosts

The strings’ excitement, the applauding drum
Are but the initiating ceremony
That out of cloud the ancestral face may come.

And never hear their subaltern mockery,
Graphiti-writers, moss-grown with whimsies,
Loquacious when the watercourse is dry.

It is your face I see, and morning’s praise
Of you is ghost’s approval of the choice,
Filtered through roots of the effacing grass.

Fear, taking me aside, would give advice
“To conquer her, the visible enemy,
It is enough to turn away the eyes.”

Yet there’s no peace in this assaulted city
But speeches at the corners, hope for news,
Outside the watchfires of a stronger army.

And all emotions to expression came,
Recovering the archaic imagery:
This longing for assurance takes the form

Of a hawk’s vertical stooping from the sky;
These tears, salt for a disobedient dream,
The lunatic agitation of the sea;

While this despair with hardened eyeballs cries
“A Golden Age, a Silver . . . rather this,
Massive and taciturn years, the Age of Ice.”