High Falcon & Other Poems/Ghostly Tree

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GHOSTLY TREE
O beech, unbind your yellow leaf, for deepThe honeyed time lies sleeping, and lead shadeSeals up the eyelids of its golden sleep.Long are your flutes, chimes, little bells, at rest,And here is only the cold scream of the fox,Only the hunter following on the hound;While your quaint-plumaged,The bird that your green summer boughs lapped round,Bends south its soft bright breast.
Before the winter and the terror break,Scatter the leaf that broadened with the roseNot for a tempest, but a sigh, to take.Four nights to exorcise the thing that stoodBound by these frail which dangle at your branch,They ran a frosty dagger to its heart;And it, wan substance,No more remembered it might cry or startOr stain a point with blood.
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