Forgotten Songs

 

Forgotten Songs 

By Kate Seymour Maclean

There is a splendid tropic flower which flings

Its fiery disc wide open to the core–

One pulse of subtlest fragrance–once a life

That rounds a century of blossoming things

And dies, a flower’s apotheosis: nevermore

To send up in the sunshine, in sweet strife

With all the winds, a fountain of live flame,

A winged censer in the starlight swung

Once only, flinging all its wealth abroad

To the wide deserts without shore or name

And dying, like a lovely song, once sung

By some dead poet, music’s wandering ghost,

Aeons ago blown oat of life and lost,

Remembered only in the heart of God.