Death Looking Quietly Down

The tears that death cannot steal
Are mine to hold still.
I am bleeding for this eiderdown,
There is no softer place to fall.

In a summer dream
I caressed the voids
And winter winds between them.
There are such tears there,
I cannot bleed
And so I find rest where love cannot follow.

My precious saints lie dead,
And my altars are all desecrated
Here there are gardens
Where the laurel grows alone
And all the friends that I would claim
Were writ long ago in memorial stone.

There are angels but their harps are broken,
They cannot sing the beauty of the heavens
They cannot bear the burden of the snow
And I walk among them to listen
To the lament of the ages,
Which is but a sigh, but a sigh in the haze.

In one winter dream, I could have sworn,
I heard a man tell me he heard me sing,
At the hour when the heart was locked away
And the body knew the shades of decay.
If I could know that voice spoke true,
I could perhaps rest a while,
But it was but a dream, but a dream
And my wakening in the dawn
Reveals merely the tears of the stones.

O! God! Can I not lift them from repose?
Can I not tear asunder the ages of silence?
What life I might bring to the garden
Where the laurel waits to find the tenant
Who calls the sweetest of notes to me.
An eternity he has waited. An eternity of screams
That seem only a dim melody amid the streams
That are singing in voices of their own
To the woodland quiet where I have found
No semblance of a bed,
No terrain of slumber
And thus wander for the flavors
Of death looking quietly down.