Nocturne

THE VEIL of light slipped
From the sky:
Only greyness.
And in the valley
One home light —
Not mine.

I most remember, then,
Shadows of boughs
Lattice-wise falling
On white walls
Of my home
Beneath the moon.

Iris Barry

NOCTURNE

You that have heard the heartbeat of the night,
you that have heard, in the long, sleepless hours,
a closing door, the rumble of distant wheels,
a vague echo, a wandering sound from somewhere:

you, in the moments of mysterious silence,
when the forgotten ones issue from their prison –
in the hour of the dead, In the hour of repose –
will know how to read the bitterness in my verses.
I fill them, as one would fill a glass, with all
my grief for remote memories and black misfortunes,
the nostalgia of my flower-intoxicated soul
and the pain of a heart grown sorrowful with fêtes;

with the burden of not being what I might have been,
the loss of the kingdom that was awaiting me,
the thought of the instant when I might not have been born
and the dream my life has been ever since I was!

All this has come in the midst of that boundless silence
in which the night develops earthly illusions,
and I feel as if an echo of the world’s heart
had penetrated and disturbed my own.