AT that lost hour disowned of day and night, 
The after-birth of midnight, when life's face 
Turns to the wall and the last lamp goes out 
Before the incipient irony of dawn -- 
In that obliterate interval of time 
Between the oil's last flicker and the first 
Reluctant shudder of averted day, 
Threading the city's streets (like mine own ghost 
Wakening the echoes of dispeopled dreams), 
I smiled to see how the last light that fought 
Extinction was the old familiar glare 
Of supper tables under gas-lit ceilings, 
The same old stale monotonous carouse 
Of greed and surfeit nodding face to face 
O'er the picked bones of pleasure . . . 
So that the city seemed, at that waste hour, 
Like some expiring planet from whose face 
All nobler life had perished -- love and hate, 
And labor and the ecstasy of thought -- 
Leaving the eyeless creatures of the ooze, 
Dull offspring of its first inchoate birth, 
The last to cling to its exhausted breast. 

And threading thus the aimless streets that strayed 
Conjectural through a labyrinth of death, 
Strangely I came upon two hooded nuns, 
Hands in their sleeves, heads bent as if beneath 
Some weight of benediction, gliding by 
Punctual as shadows that perform their round 
Upon the inveterate bidding of the sun 
Again and yet again their ordered course 
At the same hour crossed mine: obedient shades 
Cast by some high-orbed pity on the waste 
Of midnight evil! and my wondering thoughts 
Tracked them from the hushed convent where there kin 
Lay hived in sweetness of their prayer built cells. 
What wind of fate had loosed them from the lee 
Of that dear anchorage where their sisters slept? 
On what emprise of heavenly piracy 
Did such frail craft put forth upon this world; 
In what incalculable currents caught

And swept beyond the signal-lights of home 
Did their white coifs set sail against the night? 

At last, upon my wonder drawn, I followed 
The secret wanderers till I saw them pause 
Before the dying glare of those tall panes 
Where greed and surfeit nodded face to face 
O'er the picked bones of pleasure . . . 
And the door opened and the nuns went in. 

Again I met them, followed them again. 
Straight as a thought of mercy to its goal 
To the same door they sped. I stood alone. 
And suddenly the silent city shook 
With inarticulate clamor of gagged lips, 
As in Jerusalem when the veil was rent 
And the dead drove the living from the streets. 
And all about me stalked the shrouded dead, 
Dead hopes, dead efforts, loves and sorrows dead, 
With empty orbits groping for their dead 
In that blind mustering of murdered faiths . . . 
And the door opened and the nuns came out. 

I turned and followed. Once again we came 
To such a threshold, such a door received them, 
They vanished, and I waited. The grim round 
Ceased only when the festal panes grew dark 
And the last door had shot its tardy bolt. 
'Too late!' I heard one murmur; and 'Too late!' 
The other, in unholy antiphon. 
And with dejected steps they turned away. 

They turned, and still I tracked them, till they bent 
Under the lee of a calm convent wall 
Bounding a quiet street. I knew the street, 
One of those village byways strangely trapped 
In the city's meshes, where at loudest noon 
The silence spreads like moss beneath the foot, 
And all the tumult of the town becomes 
Idle as Ocean's fury in a shell. 

Silent at noon -- but now, at this void hour, 
When the blank sky hung over the blank streets 
Clear as a mirror held above dead lips, 
Came footfalls, and a thronging of dim shapes 
About the convent door: a suppliant line 
Of pallid figures, ghosts of happier folk, 
Moving in some gray underworld of want 
On which the sun of plenty never dawns. 

And as the nuns approached I saw the throng 
Pale emanation of that outcast hour, 
Divide like vapor when the sun breaks through 
And take the glory on its tattered edge. 
For so a brightness ran from face to face, 
Faint as a diver's light beneath the sea 
And as a wave draws up the beach, the crowd 
Drew to the nuns. 
I waited. Then those two 
Strange pilgrims of the sanctuaries of sin 
Brought from beneath their large conniving cloaks 
Two hidden baskets brimming with rich store 
Of broken viands -- pasties, jellies, meats, 
Crumbs of Belshazzar's table, evil waste 
Of that interminable nightly feast 
Of greed and surfeit, nodding face to face 
O'er the picked bones of pleasure . . . 
And piteous hands were stretched to take the bread 
Of this strange sacrament -- this manna brought 
Out of the antique wilderness of sin. 

Each seized a portion, turning comforted 
From this new breaking of the elements; 
And while I watche