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Nor know that he might move it from the spot—The harm was done: from having been star shotThe very nature of the soil was hot
And burning to yield flowers instead of grain,Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rainPoured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.
He moved it roughly with an iron bar,He loaded an old stone-boat with the starAnd not, as you might think, a flying car,
Such as even poets would admit perforceMore practical than Pegasus the horseIf it could put a star back in its course.
He dragged it though the ploughed ground at a paceBut faintly reminiscent of the raceOf jostling rock in interstellar space.
It went for building-stone, and I as thoughCommanded in a dream forever goTo right the wrong that this should have been so.
Yet ask where else it could have gone as well,I do not know—I cannot stop to tell:He might have left it lying where it fell.
From following walls I never lift my eyeExcept at night to places in the skyWhere showers of charted meteors let fly.
Some may know what they seek in school and church,And why they seek it there; for what I searchI must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch;
Sure that though not a star of death and birth,So not to be compared, perhaps, in worthTo such resorts of life as Mars and Earth,—
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