Here We Stand Before the Temporal World

by Joan Murray (1917-1942)



Here we stand before the temporal world,

And whether we care to cast our minds

Or shiver from our words all that refutes

The clarity of thought...*

Whether we wish to deflect the rudiments of source

...Bare bastard brats in summing up the whole...

These things I do not know.



Words have been to me like steps

Revolving and revolving in one cell.

Perhaps others have felt the limits of the pendulum,

Looking to the vast confines of night,

And conscious only of the narrow head,

The brief skull imminent of life,

Gray granules that, like Time, run through the hours.



Caesar walked quietly in his garden.

Two scribes walked gravely at his side.

The smooth pink marble of the fluted column passed

Reminded him of warm wine from the grapes,

The glitter of a spear dropped carelessly,

And caught by a hand quicker than he could see

Its slanting fall,

Reminded him of the shallow eyes that glinted

As he passed between two worlds, their own and his.

His thoughts tended toward irrelevance,

But his words cut out the veriest patterns

Of an easter drive toward the steeples of far Babylon.



*Author's elipses throughout.