  As a soul from whom companionships subside The meaningless and onsweeping tide Of the river hastening, as it would disown Old ways and places, left this stone Of sand above the valley, to look down Miles of the valley, hamlet, village, town. ***** It is a head-gear of a chief whose head, Down from the implacable brow, Waiting is held below The waters, feather decked With blossoms blue and red, With ferns and vines; Hiding beneath the waters, head erect, His savage eyes and treacherous designs. ***** It is a musing memory and memorial Of geologic ages Before the floods began to fall; The cenotaph of sorrows, pilgrimages Of Marquette and LaSalle. The eagles and the Indians left it here In solitude, blown clean Of kindred things: as an oak whose leaves are sere Fly over the valley when the winds are keen, And nestle where the earth receives Another generation of exhausted leaves. ***** Fatigued with age its sleepless eyes look over Fenced fields of corn and wheat, Barley and clover. The lowered pulses of the river beat Invisibly by shores that stray In progress and retreat Past Utica and Ottawa, And past the meadow where the Illini Shouted and danced under the autumn moon, When toddlers and papooses gave a cry, And dogs were barking for the boon Of the hunter home again to clamorous tents Smoking beneath the evening's copper sky. Later the remnant of the Illini Climbed up this Rock, to die Of hunger, thirst, or down its sheer ascents Rushed on the spears of Pottawatomies, And found the peace Where thirst and hunger are unknown. ***** This is the tragic and the fateful stone Le Rocher or Starved Rock, A symbol and a paradigm, A sphinx of elegy and battle hymn, Whose lips unlock Life's secret, which is vanishment, defeat, In epic dirges for the races That pass and leave no traces Before new generations driven in the blast Of Time and Nature blowing round its head. Renewing in the Present what the Past Knew wholly, or in part, so to repeat Warfare, extermination, old things dead But brought to life again In Life's immortal pain. ***** What Destinies confer, And laughing mock LaSalle, his dreamings stir To wander here, depart The fortress of Creve Coeur, Of broken heart, For this fort of Starved Rock? After the heart is broken then the cliff Where vultures flock; And where below its steeps the savage skiff Cuts with a pitiless knife the rope let down For water. From the earth this Indian town Vanished and on this Rock the Illini Thirsting, their buckets taken with the knife, Lay down to die. ***** This is the land where every generation Lets down its buckets for the water of Life. We are the children and the epigone Of the Illini, the vanished nation. And this starved scarp of stone Is now the emblem of our tribulation, The inverted cup of our insatiable thirst, The Illini by fate accursed, This land lost to the Pottawatomies, They lost the land to us, Who baffled and idolatrous, And thirsting, spurred by hope Kneel upon aching knees, And with our eager hands draw up the bucketless rope. ***** This is the tragic, the symbolic face, Le Rocher or Starved Rock, Round which the eternal turtles drink and swim And serpents green and strange, As race comes after race, War after war. This is the sphinx whose Memnon lips breathe dirges To empire's wayward star, And over the race's restless urges, Whose lips unlock Life's secret which is vanishment and change. |
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