Boy Reading

THE house I lived in was a place
Of warm and lighted blocks of space,
And when my life outdoors was done,
Roof made them all by night seem one.
I sprawled upon the floor and read,
But more than book was in my head.
My mood was not then cloud, but cave
At the bottom of night. A rolling wave
That floated stars and one white moon
Might flood the house, although not soon.
‘Not yet, not yet,’ between the lines
I read in urgent shifting signs.
I could not, must not, go to bed
Until I knew what the whole book said.
‘Here is a hundred-year-old day
In word s forever wearing away,
Tall with ships and loud with men,
And over the page the guns again,
And over the page again the words
Locked in the onward flight of birds.’
Troy was falling in blood and dust;
Confederate swords were dark with rust;
An English ship at noon went down;
A great shell burst in a country town.
I was a child who turned the page
With a reader’s right and hungry rage
To take the meaning and make it his.
There in the book it was, and is.
For always reading I looked away
At things a book could never say.
I felt then how the house must feel
To be a thing built right and real.
I knew above this floor another,
And walls that kept the rooms together.
I thought some pride in being there,
As they were built, and sheer, and square,
Was what they knew. I know I trusted
The beams unsplit and nails unrusted,
And rock in the old foundation tight
Under the house in the hollow night.
And here on the lighted floors of home
Were Gettysburg and fallen Rome,
And a shell-hole deep in a village square.
The green lamp shone in evening air,
And bedtime came, and the end of the book,
And out to the dark of sleep I took
The dreams that fade but never cease,
The words of war in the house of peace.