The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

I.NSIT N.ATURAE R.EGINA I.SIS And still there was silence, and the voice of the world swept by me, Making in mine ears the noise of tumbling waters; But two voices I heard, and they spake one to the other: “Who stands with downcast eyes in the temple of our Lady?” And the answer: “ A wanderer from the world who hath sought the halls of silence; Yet knoweth he not the Bride of the Darkness, Her of the sable wings, and eyes of terrible blindness That see through the worlds and find nothing and nothing, Who would smite the worlds to peace, save that so she would perish, And cannot, for that she is a goddess silent and immortal, Utterly immortal in the gods’ eternal darkness.” And the first voice cried: ‘‘ Oh, that we might perish, And become as pearls of blackness on the breast of the silence, Lending the waste places of the world our darkness, That the vision might burst in the brain of the seer, And we be formed anew, and reborn in the light world.” But the other voice was silent, and the noise of waters swept me Back into the world, and I lay asleep on a hill-side. Bearing for evermore the heart of a goddess, And the brain of a man, and the wings of the morning Clipped by the shears of the silence; so must I wander lonely, Nor know of the light till I enter into the darkness. Omnia VINCAM. 23