The Keys of Granada

’TIS centuries since they were torn away,Those sad-faced Moors from their belovèd Spain;In long procession to the wind-swept bay,With sobs and muttered curses, fierce with pain,They took their woful road and never came again.

Behind them lay the homes of their delight,The marble courtyards and cool palaces,Where fountains flashed and shimmered day and night’Neath dusk and silver blooms of blossoming trees.They closed the echoing doors, and bore away the keys.

Palace and pleasure-garden are forgot;The marble walls have crumbled long ago;Their site, their ownership, remembered not,And helpless wrath alike and hopeless woeAre cooled and comforted by Time’s all-healing flow.

But still the children of those exiled Moors,A sad transplanted stem on alien shore,Keep as their trust—and will while time endures—The rusty keys which their forefathers bore;The keys of those shut doors which ne’er shall open more.

The doors are dust, but yet the hope lives on;The walls are dust, but memories cannot die;And still each sad-faced father tells his sonOf the lost homes, the blue Granadian sky,The glory and the wrong of those old days gone by.

Ah, keys invisible of happy doorsWhich long ago our own hands fastened tight!We treasure them as do those hapless Moors,Though dust the palaces of our delight,Vacant and bodiless and vanished quite.

Keys of our dear, dead hopes, we prize them still,Wet them with tears, embalm with useless sighs;And at their sight and touch our pulses stillWaken and throb, and under alien skiesWe taste the airs of home and gaze in long-closed eyes.