Silent Noon

by Alex

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,
The finger points look through like rosy blooms:
Your eye smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
‘Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass,

All around our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kincupfields with silver edge,
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorne hedge.
‘Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-search’d growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosen’d from the sky:
So this wing’d hour is dropt to us from above.

Oh! Clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companion’d inarticulate hour,
When twofold silence was the song of love.

- Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I’m thinking of the Vaughn Williams setting of this, of course.