THE REAPER

All Eternity wondered and trembled to wait
Where the darkness was barren and grasping for life .......
It was Time who came walking beyond the star-gate
With the birth in his seed and the death in his scythe.

All alone he was dressed in the fabric of night,
With the warp and the weft of the moon and the stars;
And his hair hung in braids in the amethyst light,
And his forehead was bronze like the sands upon Mars.

And alone he was sowing the shimmering seed
Where the light-years are cleft by the furrows of time;
Then he paced far and wide with the silence of speed
To the poles of the sky where the star-deserts climb.

And he scattered the rain with the burning of suns
As he flew on the winds of a world's dying wake ......
Till the grain it grew high where Eternity runs,
Then he took up his scythe for the harvest to take.

For the wheat grew so golden and green as it swirled,
And the years fell away from the blade of his scythe;
Where each step that he took was the death of a world,
And each stem that he cut was the loss of a life.

But unmindful, he severed the green and the gold
As he wielded the blade in the glance of his eye;
Then he gathered them in, both the young and the old,
And their memories he tossed to the dust of the sky.

And the Universe died by his scythe's measured reap;
Then alone he went wandering into the black,
With his burden of souls in the quiet of sleep .......
And still soundlessly walking, he never looked back,

And still soundlessly walking ......
He never looks back.