The Coal Picker
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e perches in the slime, inert,Bedaubed with iridescent dirt.The oil upon the puddles driesTo colours like a peacock's eyes,And half-submerged tomato-cansShine scaly, as leviathansOozily crawling through the mud.The ground is here and there bestudWith lumps of only part-burned coal.His duty is to glean the whole,To pick them from the filth, each one,To hoard them for the hidden sunWhich glows within each fiery coreAnd waits to be made free once more.Their sharp and glistening edges cutHis stiffened fingers. Through the smutGleam red the wounds which will not shut.Wet through and shivering he kneelsAnd digs the slippery coals; like eelsThey slide about. His force all spent,He counts his small accomplishment.A half-a-dozen clinker-coalsWhich still have fire in their souls.Fire! And in his thought there burnsThe topaz fire of votive urns.He sees it fling from hill to hill,And still consumed, is burning still.Higher and higher leaps the flame,The smoke an ever-shifting frame.He sees a Spanish Castle old,With silver steps and paths of gold.From myrtle bowers comes the plashOf fountains, and the emerald flashOf parrots in the orange trees,Whose blossoms pasture humming bees.He knows he feeds the urns whose smokeBears visions, that his master-strokeIs out of dirt and miseryTo light the fire of poesy.He sees the glory, yet he knowsThat others cannot see his shows.To them his smoke is sightless, black,His votive vessels but a packOf old discarded shards, his fireA peddler's; still to him the pyreIs incensed, an enduring goal!He sighs and grubs another coal.
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