Page:The poems of Emma Lazarus volume 1.djvu/179

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DON RAFAEL.
165

My body dust and ashes shall remain,
Tired heart and brain shall sleep.

"Life has one gate alone,
Obscure, beset with peril and fierce pain.
Large death has many portals to his fane,
Why choose we to make moan?

"Why dwell with worms and clay
When we may soar through air on wings of flame,
Dissolve to small, white dust our perfect frame,
And never know decay?

"A brother s pious hand
The pure, fire-winnowed ashes shall inurn,
And lay them in the orange grove where burn
Globed suns that scent the land.

"The leaf shall be more green,
Even for my dust more snowy-soft the flower,
More juicy-sweet the fruit’s live pulp the bower
Richer that I have been.

"For I would not," he said,
"Tears and the black pall and the wormy grave,
Grief s hideous panoply I would not have
Round me when I am dead."

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