Advice to a Prophet, by Richard Wilbur
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity
Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range
The long numbers that rocket the mind
Our slow unrecking hearts will be left behind
Unable to fear what is too strange
Nor shall you scare of with talk of the death of the race
How should be dream of this place without us
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us
A stone look on a stones face
Speak of the world's own change, though we cannot conceive
Of an undrempt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost
How the view alters. We could believe
If you told us so, that the white tailed dream will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye
The jack pine loses its knuckled grip
On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, it's gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we do without
The Dolphin's arc, the dove's return
Those things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
As is prophet, how shall we call
Our nature forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken
In which we have said that the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
the singing locust of the soul unshelled
And all we mean or wish to mean
Ask us, ask us whether with the world less rose
Our hearts shall fail us, come determine
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak tree close.
