'I grieve for that night'

“Gay Head” (on Martha’s Vineyard, 1860) (engraving), by David Hunter Strother

“Misty Morning, Coast of Maine” by Arthur Parton (1842–1914)

All these years I have remembered a night
When islands ran black into a sea of silk,
A bay and an open roadstead set to a shimmer like cool, white silk
Under an August moon.
Trees lifted themselves softly into the moonlight,
A vine on the balcony glittered with a scattered brilliance,
The roofs of distant houses shone solidly like ice.
Wind passed,
It touched me.
The touch of the wind was cool, impersonal;
The fingers of the wind brushed my face and left me.
I remember that I shivered,
And that the long, continuous sound of the sea beneath the cliff
Seemed the endless breathing of the days I must live through alone.
I grieve for that night as for something wasted.
You are with me now, but that was twenty years ago,
And the future is shortened by many days.
I no longer fear the length of them,
I dread the swiftness of their departure.
But they go — go —
With the thunderous rapidity of a waterfall,
And scarcely can we find a slow, cool night
To consider ourselves,
And the peaceful shining of the moon
Along a silken sea.

— “Grievance,’’ by Brookline, Mass.-based poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925)