REJOICE IN THE ABYSS
\\"hen the foundations quaked and the pillars shook,
I trembled, and in the dark I felt the fear
Of the photograph my skull might take
Through the eyesockets, in one flashlit instant,
'Vhen the crumbling house would obliterate
hvery impression of my sunlit life
With one impression of black final horror,
Covering me with irrecoverable doom.
But the pulsation passed, and glass lay round me,
And I arose from the acrid dust, and in the night
I walked through the clattering houses,
A prophet seeking tongues of flame.
Against a background of cloud, I saw
The houses kneel, exposed in their abject
Centennial human prayer: "0 fate
Spare us from grief that punishes our neighbours."
And the heads of passers by, looked through,
Revealed the same shameless entreaty.
Then in the icy night, indifferent to our
Sulphurous nether fate, I saw
The dead of all time heaped in one clear tide
Uplifted on the points of stars, above
This town, whose walls of brick and flesh
Are transitory dwellings of the spirit
Which climbs to that enormous tide of death.
The streets then filled with London prophets,
Saints of Covent Garden, Parliament Fields,
Ihe Heath, Lambeth, and Saint Johns' Wood Graveyard,
Vvho cried in cockney fanatic voices:
"In the mid<st of loif is death." And they all kneeled
And prayed against the misery manufactured
In factories, the pride of houses,
Ambition of palaces, vain hope of Churches,
