[Poetry Advent Calendar] today's poem

[angevin2]

It is clear that my mood is going down the crapper because when I tried to think of a poem for today's post it was terribly difficult to work up the interest. So here's a depressing one.

Lonely Burial
Stephen Vincent Benét

There were not many at that lonely place,
Where two scourged hills met in a little plain.
The wind cried loud in gusts, then low again.
Three pines strained darkly, runners in a race
Unseen by any. Toward the further woods
A dim harsh noise of voices rose and ceased.
- We were most silent in those solitudes -
Then, sudden as a flame, the black-robed priest,
The clotted earth piled roughly up about
The hacked red oblong of the new-made thing,
Short words in swordlike Latin - and a rout
Of dreams most impotent, unwearying.
Then, like a blind door shut on a carouse,
The terrible bareness of the soul's last house.