“the ghost of the silver Moon arose, / Holding her yellow lamp”

For Poetry Monday:

The Neighbors, Theodosia Garrison

    At first cock-crow
    The ghosts must go
    Back to their quiet graves below.

Against the distant striking of the clock
I heard the crowing cock,
    And I arose and threw the window wide;
        Long, long before the setting of the moon,
        And yet I knew they must be passing soon—
    My neighbors who had died—
Back to their narrow green-roofed homes that wait
Beyond the churchyard gate.

I leaned far out and waited—all the world
Was like a thing impearled,
    Mysterious and beautiful and still:
        The crooked road seemed one the moon might lay,
        Our little village slept in Quaker gray,
    And gray and tall the poplars on the hill;
And then far off I heard the cock—and then
My neighbors passed again.

( At first it seemed a white cloud, nothing more )

Garrison (1874-1944) was a prolific writer of stories and poems for American magazines in the first couple decades of the 20th century, with four poetry collections published between 1909 and 1921. It is difficult to find any biographical data aside from that she was born and buried in New Jersey, married twice (neither a writer?), and wrote under her first husband’s surname.

---L.

Subject quote from The Ballad of Judas Iscariot, Robert Buchanan.