Royal Palm

Green rustlings, more-than-regal charities
Drift coolly from that tower of whispered light.
Amid the noontide’s blazed aspertities
I watched the sun’s most gracious anchorite

Climb up as by communings, year on year
Uneaten of the earth or aught earth holds,
And the gray trunk, that’s elephantine, rear
Its frondings sighing in ethereal folds.

Forever fruitless, and beyond that yield
Of sweat the jungle presses with hot love
And tendril till our deathward breath is sealed-
It grazes the horizons, launched above

Mortality-ascending emerald-bright,
A fountain at salute, a crown in view-
Unshackled, casual of its azured height,
As though it soared suchwise through heaven too.

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