The Southern Cross uplifts one glowing star
Between the horizon and the Gulf afar;
I watch the light from the lone river bar,
And gaze across the sea.
A sea, on which an hundred sunsets flow,
Whose tides around an hundred islands glow,
Where lies the sky above in deeps below, —
A shadow falls on me.
Has heaven opened? — do evangels fly,
As in the prophet's heaven, across the sky?
An hundred silver wings now fill my eye,
A cloud of wings, as one.
O Ibis, Ibis! whose thin wings of white
Scarce stir the roses of the sunset light,
When Day dissolving leaves the coasts to Night,
And far seas hide the sun;
From weedy weirs where blaze the tropic noons,
Savannas dark where cool the fiery moons;
From still Lake Worth, and mossy-walled lagoons,
Where never footsteps stray;
To far Clear Water, and its isles of pine,
From beryl seas to seas of opaline,
Those level coasts where helpless sea conchs shine,
Thou driftest on thy way!
Ibis, Ibis, bird of Hermes bold,
The avatar to men from gates of gold,
That blessed all eyes that saw thy wings of old,
My thought, like thee, hath wings.
I follow thee, as cool the shadows fall,
And burn the stars on yon horizon's wall;
And Memphian altars, as my thoughts recall,
My soul to thee upspring !
My heart to-night with Nature's soul is thrilled,
As with the fire that priests of Isis filled
When rose thy wings, and all the world was stilled
Beneath thy lucent plumes!
O Ibis, Ibis, whence thy silent flight?
O'er everglades that only fire-flies light,
Magnolias languid with their blooms, when Night
Gathers from far her glooms.
O'er mossy live-oaks, high palmetto shades,
The cypressed lakelets of the everglades;
O'er rivers dead, and still pines' colonnades,
Where sweet the jessamine grows;
Where red blooms flame amid the trailing moss,
And streams unnumbered low lianas cross,
Wild orange groves, where in their nests of floss
The sun-birds find repose.
But hark! what sound upon the stillness breaks?
A rifle shot — a boatman on the lakes,
An Ibis' wing above in silver flakes —
'A white bird downward falls!
O Ibis, Ibis, of the tropic skies,
For whom the arches of the sunsets rise,
God made this world to be thy Paradise,
Thy Eden without walls.
O Ibis dead, that on the dark lake floats,
Whose dimming eyes see not the sportsmen's boats,
O'er whose torn wing some brutal instinct gloats,
I wonder if in thee
Live not some spirit, — so the Egyptian thought, —
Some inner life from Life's great Fountain brought,
Something divine from God's great goodness caught,
Some immortality?
Are all these Paradises dead to thee,
The cool savanna and the purple sea,
The air, thy ocean, where thou wanderest free, —
I wonder, are they dead?
Or hast thou yet a spirit life, that flies
Like thine own image through the endless skies,
And art thou to some new-born Paradise
By higher instincts led?
Is death, like life, alike to all that live?
Does God to all a double being give?
Do all that breathe eternal life receive?
Is thought, where'er it be,
Immortal as the Source from whence it came? —
O living Ibis, in the sunset's flame,
Still flying westward thou and I, the same,
Can answer not — but He?
Poetry Atlas has many other poems about Florida.