Poems (Forrest)/The fruit of day

THE FRUIT OF DAY

Night is the fruit of day, a shining fruit,
Of a dark apple of the moonless hours
Sprung from the mists of earth, a tree whose root
Packed with the perfume of a million flowers
Drinks at the well-spring of our secret thought
Till, sap and stem, the final aim have wrought.

Where the blue bough of Heaven earthward dips,
Dawn was the rosy pricking of the bud,
The paling stars were clipt for silver pips,
But when the warm noon came to mellow flood,
It brought the petals of the finished flower
Till thrifty Twilight, in her moth-grey bower,

Moulds with mysterious fingers, Night's full globe
Of blossom-trembling hedges by the rill,
Where hands unseen have caught the stealthy robe
That rustles, to hushed laughters, up the hill:
Fate, plucking from Life's tree a varied loot
Will drop into our laps our cherished fruit!

A child at play beside the long lagoon
Finds Night come down a sun-kist apricot
Grass-yellow as a lifting harvest moon
All firm and wholesome flesh: no creeping rot
Making the roughened stone a tomb, to hide
The myriad writhing worms that lurk inside!

To one shall come the Apple of Desire
Red-stained upon the ambers of its globe,
Keeping within its core a smouldering fire
To scorch the snout, that nozzles Circe's robe:
A fatal circle is its pared rind,
Where the slow seeds of lust their fruits shall find:

To one may fall an orange of the South
Glistening mosaics packed within its sphere,
Rich with the scarlets of a passionate mouth
Or quivering rainbows, fashioned on a tear. . . .
Because he cannot hope to build again
The castle towers that seemed so real—in Spain.

A purple plum Night flings the sailor-man;
It cast white petals once in Tokio
Emblem of purity in Old Japan,
But wanderers cannot reap the seed they sow
. . . Too ripe for him to-day the earth-fruits come,
Thirsting upon the flavour of a plum.

The scientist, as sere as dust by day,
One might suspect of dessicated fruits,
But he is dreaming back an English May,
A stretch of dappled grass, and primrose roots,
Night brings no husks to one who grasps at truth
His threaded cherries have the taste of youth!

Night is the fruit of day. So empty are
The hands of some, Night brings them only sleep,
Untrimmed the lamp—that might have been a star,
Unborn the fruits, and buried, dry and deep,
The shoot of promise. So they wake alone
To barren acres where no seed was sown,

I often wonder what Night brings to you!
With your still pools of thought where lilies glaeam
Even at dawn your scattered blossoms blew
Your bannered boughs on every wild wind stream—
Surely you pluck from Day's prolific trees
The golden apples of Hesperides!