Your live moved clean
Within hard walls
Of stillness and despair.
It suffered stone to compass it,
An adamantine lair.
Infrequent nights,
In solitude,
You sat in echoing rooms,
And drew your desperate pained thoughts
From out their catacombs.
To set them
To a music chill
Your spirit split its bars,
Rose, on its evening-opened wings,
To the enkindling stars.
Your slender thread
Outdistanced you,
Broke your ecstatic breath.
Your body worn to brightness,
You gave in unto death—
That solitude
Where no doors shut
By pained winds cruelly blown;
Silent, deep-held, locked in a heart
More secret than your own.