Harlan Sewall

    You never understood,
    O unknown one,
    Why it was I repaid
    Your devoted friendship and delicate ministrations
    First with diminished thanks,
    Afterward by gradually withdrawing my presence from you,
    So that I might not be compelled to thank you,
    And then with silence which followed upon
    Our final Separation.
    You had cured my diseased soul.
    But to cure it
    You saw my disease, you knew my secret,
    And that is why I fled from you.
    For though when our bodies rise from pain
    We kiss forever the watchful hands
    That gave us wormwood, while we shudder
    For thinking of the wormwood,
    A soul that's cured is a different matter,
    For there we'd blot from memory
    The soft - toned words, the searching eyes,
    And stand forever oblivious,
    Not so much of the sorrow itself
    As of the hand that healed it.