Clouds Without Water

II Like to a country in the interdict Whose folk lack all the grace of eucharist, My heart is; all the pangs its foes inflict Are naught to this unutterable mist Of absence. Where's the daily sacrament, The glad devouring of your body and blood, Sweet soul of Christ, my Lola? I am rent Even as the demons from the face of God When they would peer into beatitude. I am barred from the incalculable bliss, The unutterable chrism, the soul’s food, Of you, your gaze, your word, your touch, your kiss O Gods, Fates, Fiends — whoever plays the Pope ! Lift up your curse — leave me not without hope! IT] My soul is like the savage upland plains Of utmost wretchedness in Tartary. No strength of sun, no fertilizing rains! Only a bitter wind, intense and dry, Cuts over them. Hardly the memory stands Of one who travels there ; his pain forgets The golden bliss of all those other lands Where he was happy. So the blizzard frets Its sterile death across my soul, and chills All hope of life even from the rare sad seeds It blows from sunnier vales and happier hills, Though at the best they be but worthless weeds. I stand — I scan the infinite horizon Of hopeless hope — yet I must travel on.