O bird grotesque and garrulous,
In green and scarlet liveried,
Thy ceaseless prattle hides from us
The secret of thy dream indeed.
But in thine eyeball’s mystic bead
Are mirrored clear to them that read
Vague, nameless longings, like the breed
Of some exotic incubus.
Where is thy vision? Overseas?
In some bright tropic far-off land
Where chiding simians in tall trees
Swing by luxurious breezes fanned,
While at fantastic phallic feasts
Brown women uncouth idols hail,
And through the forest sounds the wail
Of the fierce matings of wild beasts?
Or are thine other memories,
Of other lives on other trees,
Encasements in some previous flesh
In far-off lost existences?
For, as the tiger leaves his spoor
Upon the prairie, firm and sure
Life writes itself upon the brain,
The soul keeps count of loss and gain,
And in the vibrant, living cells
Of the small parrot’s brain there dwells
A sparkle of the flame benign
That makes the human mind divine.
The self-same Life-Force fashions us:
Its writings are the stars on high,
Its transient mansions thou as I.
Through Plato’s mouth it speaks to us,
Through the earth’s vermin even thus.
The heaving of a baby’s breast
And the gyrations of the sun
To its omnipotence are one
And make its meaning manifest.
We both are wanderers through all time
Who, risen from the primal slime
When God blew life into the dust,
Press to some distant goal sublime.
And often through the thin soul-crust
Rush memories of an alien clime,
Of gorgeous revels more robust
Than any dream of hate or lust
In the gilt cage upon us thrust,
And visions strange beyond all rhyme.
The Life-Force with itself at war
Moulds and remoulds us, blood and brain,
Yet cannot quench us out again,
And after every change we _are_.
The soul-spark in all sentient things
Illumes the night of death and brings,
Remembered, immortality.
Time cannot take thy soul from thee!
All living things are one by kind,
Heritors of the cosmic mind.
Thus deemed the Prophet on whose knee
The kitten slumbered peacefully,
And surely good Saint Francis, he
Who as his sister loved the hind.