For Lincoln MacVeagh
Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall
Some laborer found one faded and stone-cold
And saving that its weight suggested gold
And tugged it from his first too certain hold
He noticed nothing in it to remark
He was not used to handling stars thrown dark
And lifeless from an interrupted arc
He did not recognize in that smooth coal
The one thing palpable besides the soul
To penetrate the air in which we roll
He did not see how like a flying thing
It brooded ant eggs, and had one large wing
One not so large for flying in a ring
And a long Bird of Paradise's tail
(Though these when not in use to fly and trail
It drew back in its body like a snail);
Nor know that be might move it from the spot—
The harm was done: from having been star-shot
The very nature of the soil was hot
And burning to yield flowers instead of grain
Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain
Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain
He moved it roughly with an iron bar
He loaded an old stone-boat with the star
And not, as you might think, a flying car
Such as even poets would admit perforce
More practical than Pegasus the horse
If it could put a star back in its course
He dragged it through the plowed ground at a pace
But faintly reminiscent of the race
Of jostling rock in interstellar space
It went for building stone, and I, as though
Commanded in a dream, forever go
To right the wrong that this should have been so.
Yet ask where else it could have gone as well
I do not know—I cannot stop to tell:
He might have left it lying where it fell
From following walls I never lift my eye
Except at night to places in the sky
Where showers of charted meteors let fly
Some may know what they seek in school and church
And why they seek it there; for what I search
I must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch;
Sure that though not a star of d**h and birth
So not to be compared, perhaps, in worth
To such resorts of life as Mars and Earth—
Though not, I say, a star of d**h and sin
It yet has poles, and only needs a spin
To show its worldly nature and begin
To chafe and shuffle in my calloused palm
And run off in strange tangents with my arm
As fish do with the line in first alarm
Such as it is, it promises the prize
Of the one world complete in any size
That I am like to compa**, fool or wise