Orient Wheat

Our fathers in their books and speech
Have made the matter plain:
The green fields they walked in once
Will never grow again.
The corn lies under the locust’s tooth
Or blistered in the sun;
The faces of the old proud stock
Are gone where their years are gone.

The park where stags lay down at noon
Under the great trees
Is shrill with Sunday strollers now,
Littered with their lees.
Poachers have trampled down the maze
And choked the fountains dry;
The last swan of a score and ten
Goes among reeds to die.

We were born to smells of plague,
Chalk-marks on every door;
We never have heard the hunting-horn
Or feet on the gallery floor—
The high-arched feet of dancers
Who knew how to step and stand.
We were born of a leaning house
In a changed, uneasy land.

Our fathers curse the crooked time
And go to their graves at last;
While some of us laugh at doting men,
And others sigh for the past.
And the dazzled lovers lie
Where summer burns blue and green,
In the green fields they’ll be saying
Can never grow again.