The Oceanides

Out of the silence will something come to you,
Something you had been longing to hear
And cannot refuse, the voice that agrees
With patrimony, its obscurity and decline?

“The fathers…” the voice will say,
Squarely and with a hint
Of melancholy,
And then you will know that the world is ruined,
That lives end in the past tense,
That the begetting up-surge resides in itself.

Is there a golden moment where this is proved?
In all the ore of experience, was their one
Monumental and marble
Sculpted from the moments of mind,
And signifying the accord of place and time?

They will look back, the fathers,
To their children, backward into the dizzy mists
Surging and reforming like the crests
Of ocean, and these are the daughters of ocean
That sing and give birth: our children, our children!