Gray Days

A poem by John Charles McNeill

A soaking sedge,
A faded field, a leafless hill and hedge,

Low clouds and rain,
And loneliness and languor worse than pain.

Mottled with moss,
Each gravestone holds to heaven a patient Cross.

Shrill streaks of light
Two sycamores' clean-limbed, funereal white,

And low between,
The sombre cedar and the ivy green.

Upon the stone
Of each in turn who called this land his own

The gray rain beats
And wraps the wet world in its flying sheets,

And at my eaves
A slow wind, ghostlike, comes and grieves and grieves.