Click in the field, then press CTRL+C to copy the HTML code
<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=348254" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Sheep In The Ruins</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">for Learned and Augustus Hand</div><div style="margin:10px 0">You, my friends, and you strangers, all of you, <br>Stand with me a little by the walls <br>Or where the walls once were. <br>The bridge was here, the city further: <br>Now there is neither bridge nor town— <br>A doorway where the roof is down <br>Opens on a foot-worn stair <br>That climbs by three steps into empty air. <br>(What foot went there?) <br>Nothing in this town that had a thousand steeples <br>Lives now but these flocks of sheep <br>Grazing the yellow grasses where the bricks lie dead beneath: <br>Dogs drive them with their brutal teeth. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Can none but sheep live where the walls go under? <br>Is man’s day over and the sheep’s begun? <br>And shall we sit here like the mourners on a dunghill <br>Shrilling with melodious tongue— <br>Disfiguring our faces with the nails of our despair? <br>(What dust is this we sift upon our hair?) <br>Because a world is taken from us as the camels from the man of Uz <br>Shall we sit weeping for the world that was <br>And curse God and so perish? <br>Shall monuments be grass and sheep inherit them? <br>Shall dogs rule in the rubble of the arches? </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Consider, Oh consider what we are! <br>Consider what it is to be a man— <br>He who makes his journey by the glimmer of a candle; <br>Who discovers in his mouth, between his teeth, a word; <br>Whose heart can bear the silence of the stars— that burden; <br>Who comes upon his meaning in the blindness of a stone— <br>A girl’s shoulder, perfectly harmonious! </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Even the talk of it would take us days together. <br>Marvels men have made, Oh marvels!—and our breath <br>Brief as it is: our death waiting— <br>Marvels upon marvels! Works of state— <br>The imagination of the shape of order! <br>Works of beauty—the cedar door <br>Perfectly fitted to the sill of basalt! <br>Works of grace— <br>The ceremony at the entering of houses, <br>At the entering of lives: the bride among the torches in the shrill carouse! </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Works of soul— <br>Pilgrimages through the desert to the sacred boulder: <br>Through the mid night to the stroke of one! <br>Works of grace! Works of wonder! <br>All this have we done and more— <br>And seen—what have we not seen?— </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>A man beneath the sunlight in his meaning: <br>A man, one man, a man alone. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>In the sinks of the earth that wanderer has gone down. <br>The shadow of his mind is on the mountains. <br>The word he has said is kept in the place beyond <br>As the seed is kept and the earth ponders it. <br>Stones—even the stones remember him: <br>Even the leaves—his image is in them. <br>And now because the city is a ruin in the waste of air <br>We sit here and despair! <br>Because the sheep graze in the dying grove <br>Our day is over! <br>We must end <br>Because the talk around the table in the dusk has ended, <br>Because the fingers of the goddesses are found <br>Like marble pebbles in the gravelly ground <br>And nothing answers but the jackal in the desert,— <br>Because the cloud proposes, the wind says! </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Because the sheep are pastured where the staring statues lie <br>We sit upon the sand in silence <br>Watching the sun go and the shadows change! </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Listen, my friends, and you, all of you, strangers, <br>Listen, the work of man, the work of splendor <br>Never has been ended or will end. <br>Even where the sheep defile the ruined stair <br>And dogs are masters—even there <br>One man’s finger in the dust shall trace the circle. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>Even among the ruins shall begin the work, <br>Large in the level morning of the light <br>And beautiful with cisterns where the water whitens, <br>Rippling upon the lip of stone, and spills <br>By cedar sluices into pools, and the young builders <br>String their plumb lines, and the well-laid course <br>Blanches its mortar in the sun, and all the morning <br>Smells of wood-smoke, rope-tar, horse-sweat, pitch-pine, <br>Men and the trampled mint leaves in the ditch. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>One man in the sun alone <br>Walks between the silence and the stone: <br>The city rises from his flesh, his bone.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Archibald+MacLeish">Archibald MacLeish</a><div class=q>
<img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share">
<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=348254" data-title="The Sheep In The Ruins de Archibald MacLeish" data-description="for Learned and Augustus Hand

You, my friends, and you strangers, all of you, 
Stand with me a little by the walls 
Or where the walls once were. 
The bridge was here, the city further: 
Now there is neither bridge nor town— 
A doorway where th..."></div>
</div>
</div>