The house
trembles
and creaks.
Imagists
A child wakes and is afraid, and weeps in the darkness. What has made the
bed shake? "Mother, where are you? I am awake. " "Hush, my Darling, I am
here. " "But, Mother, something so queer happened, the room shook. " Boom!
"Oh! What is it? What is the matter? " Boom! "Where is Father? I am so
afraid. " Boom! The child sobs and shrieks.
The house trembles and creaks.
Boom!
Retorts, globes, tubes, and phials lie shattered. All his trials oozing
across the floor. The life that was his choosing, lonely, urgent, goaded
by a hope, all gone. A weary man in a ruined laboratory, that was his
story. Boom! Gloom and ignorance, and the jig of drunken brutes. Diseases
like snakes crawling over the earth, leaving trails of slime. Wails from
people burying their dead. Through the window he can see the rocking
steeple. A ball of fire falls on the lead of the roof, and the sky tears
apart on a spike of flame. Up the spire, behind the lacings of stone,
zig-zagging in and out of the carved tracings, squirms the fire. It spouts
like yellow wheat from the gargoyles, coils round the head of Saint John,
and aureoles him in light. It leaps into the night and hisses against the
rain. The Cathedral is a burning stain on the white, wet night.
