Atlantis Destroyed

Sound drowned on the sereneness of a sea Unstirred and cool as a mortician’s eye That holds pent death in livid memory Behind a cheap blue knockoff of the sky. Then morning tried to speak, but mused in rain. Beneath an air where humans did not speak And rare gulls needed treetops like a cane, A land lay broken like a sculptured Greek. There were no relics left of what had died: A culture girdled to the verge of space That killed itself to stones and never told Of mastered gravity and death denied: The fell aloofness of a priviliged race Where all that mighty fusion had been cold.