Underneath the stars the houses are awake;
Upward comes no sound my silent watch to break.
Night has hid the street, with all its motley sights;
Miles around, afar, shine out the city lights:

Stars that softly glimmer in a lower sky,
Dearer than, the glories unexplored on high;
Home-stars, that, like eyes, are glistening through the dark,
With a human tremor wavers every spark.

Glittering lamps above and twinkling lamps below;
The remote, strange splendor, the familiar glow:
One Eye, looking downward from creation’s dome,
Sees in both, his children’s window-lights of home.

Who have dwellings there, in avenues of space?
Whose clear torches kindle through the vague sky-place?
Are they holding tapers, us, astray, to guide,
spirit-pioneers, who lately left our side?

Never drops an answer from those worlds unknown:
Yet no ray is shining for itself alone.
Hints of heaven gleam upward, through our earthly nights;
Tremulous with pathos are the city lights:—

Tremulous with pathos of a half-told tale:
Through therein hope flickers, burning low and pale,
It shall win completeness perfect as the sun:
Broken rays shall mingle, earth and heaven be one.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 20, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

    There are ghosts in the room.
As I sit here alone, from the dark corners there
They come out of the gloom,
And they stand at my side and they lean on my chair

    There’s a ghost of a Hope
That lighted my days with a fanciful glow,
In her hand is the rope
That strangled her life out. Hope was slain long ago.

    But her ghost comes to-night
With its skeleton face and expressionless eyes,
And it stands in the light,
And mocks me, and jeers me with sobs and with sighs.

    There’s the ghost of a Joy,
A frail, fragile thing, and I prized it too much,
And the hands that destroy
Clasped its close, and it died at the withering touch.

    There’s the ghost of a Love,
Born with joy, reared with hope, died in pain and unrest,
But he towers above
All the others—this ghost; yet a ghost at the best,

    I am weary, and fain
Would forget all these dead: but the gibbering host
Make my struggle in vain—
In each shadowy corner there lurketh a ghost.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 19, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.