Recalled

  

LONG after there were none of them alive
 About the place—where there is now no place
 But a walled hole where fruitless vines embrace
Their parent skeletons that yet survive
 In evil thorns—none of us could arrive
 At a more cogent answer to their ways
Than one old Isaac in his latter days
Had humor or compassion to contrive.



 I mentioned them, and Isaac shook his head:
“The Power that you call yours and I call mine
 Extinguished in the last of them a line
That Satan would have disinherited.
 When we are done with all but the Divine,
 We die.” And there was no more to be said.


Edwin Arlington Robinson