O Testifiers To Innocence! Hold Fast! Hold Fast!
If wonder were to go there would be left a bundle of bones. Laws - without Light. Edicts - without Song.
There would be formulae carved in stone and the freeze of flashes
into such fixed shapes no one would remember the dawn of them or how the heart burned, in that first flare and the spirit soared
more blithely than any lark on wing daring to mount to very Heaven's gate.
If wonder were lost ash would await the clearest flame. And those morning stars, all singing together be no more heard
through the trumped-up
allurements so skillfully addressed to mass beyond mass of computerized men.
No one, awestruck, would again stop short in grove or on shore. Or while waiting for a traffic signal to change
in Piccadilly Circus or Times Square. No one again, from sheer joy, leap or shout as if catching
on commonplace Monday air -
O daybreak paeanings!
O spring into dance
of the inmost evidence of who and what we are!
Only the child would be left to tell.
The timeless child
that still - still - by grant of a grace so beyond its own
shall be found as wide-eyed-here as when in that first dawn
it all began.
