The Innocents

They said to us, or tried to say, and failed:

With dust implicit in the uncurled green
First leaf, and all the early garden knowing
That after rose-red petals comes the bleak
Impoverished stalk, the black dejected leaf
Crumpled and dank, we should at Maytime be
Less childlike in delight, a little reserved,
A little cognizant of rooted death.

And yet beneath the flecked leaf-gilded boughs
Along the paths fern-fringed and delicate,
We supple children played at golden age,
And knelt upon the curving steps to snare
The whisking emerald lizards, or to coax
The ancestral tortoise from his onyx shell
In lemon sunlight on the balcony.
And only pedagogues and the brittle old
Existed to declare mortality,
And they were beings removed in walk and speech.

For apprehension feeds on intellect:
Uneasy ghosts in libraries are bred—
While innocent sensuality abides
In charmed perception of an hour, a day,
Ingenuous and unafraid of time.

So in the garden we were free of fear,
And what the saffron roses or the green
Imperial dragonflies above the lake
Knew about altered seasons, boughs despoiled,
They never murmured; and to us no matter
How in the drawing room the elders sat

Balancing teacups behind curtained glass,
While rare miraculous clocks in crystal domes
Impaled the air with splintered chips of time
Forever sounding through the tea-thin talk,
An organpoint to desperate animation.

They knew, and tried to say to us, but failed;
They knew what we would never have believed.