O, Heliades, your tears flow once more down your poplar bark ragged,
Cries hushed forever below the brown wood of your transformèd eyes.
Phaethon, your brother, lies cold in the tomb ringèd round by your thicket,
Phaethon, that poor boy, that golden-haired mortal who once rode the sky.
O, Heliades, for what do you mourn? Seas polluted to poison?
Is it your brother— poor fool— who had wingèd too close to the stars?
Is it the blazing of forests that makes your tears fall from your lashes?
Fire like the flames that wreathed Phaethon, drowned down in the watery dark?
O, Heliades, we tortured the sky, turned the rain into acid,
Bleeding and breaking and taking as earth turned to dust down below.
Will you yet cry for us when in our haste we become our undoing?
Or will your tears cease
your breath of relief?
when we leave you alone to your grove?
Cries hushed forever below the brown wood of your transformèd eyes.
Phaethon, your brother, lies cold in the tomb ringèd round by your thicket,
Phaethon, that poor boy, that golden-haired mortal who once rode the sky.
O, Heliades, for what do you mourn? Seas polluted to poison?
Is it your brother— poor fool— who had wingèd too close to the stars?
Is it the blazing of forests that makes your tears fall from your lashes?
Fire like the flames that wreathed Phaethon, drowned down in the watery dark?
O, Heliades, we tortured the sky, turned the rain into acid,
Bleeding and breaking and taking as earth turned to dust down below.
Will you yet cry for us when in our haste we become our undoing?
Or will your tears cease
your breath of relief?
when we leave you alone to your grove?
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