Florence Kilpatrick Mixter

KNEELING, I worship at that holy shrine

Where Love returns when the beloved is gone:

Where night, the sea, and one dark Gothic pine

Breathe their old covenants of golden dawn.

Again I hear the reverberant plaintive tides

Chanting their litanies upon the dune,

And dream I await you where the sea divides,

Cleft by the silver pathway of the moon.

Though when the eastern rim of heaven pales

I shall arise alone, uncomforted,

Now, like a jewelled censer, night exhales

The perfumed incense of a dream long dead;

And your rapt spirit, like an organ, pours

Its glad hosannas on long-echoing shores.