Dreams Dust | Page 7

us (we cried) to war against
Some foul, embattled
wrong!"
We dreamed a Warrior whose sword
Was edged for sham and shame;

We dreamed a Statesman far above
The vulgar lust for fame.
We were not cynics, and we dreamed
A Man who made no truce

With lies nor ancient privilege
Nor old, entrenched abuse.
We dreamed . . . we dreamed . . . Youth dreamed

a dream!
And even you forgot
Yourself, one moment, and dreamed,
too--
Struck, while your mood was hot!
Struck three or four good blows . . . and then
Turned back to easier
things:
The cheap applause, the blatant mob,
The praise of
underlings!
Praise . . . praise . . . was ever man so filled,
So avid still, of praise?

So hungry for the crowd's acclaim,
The sycophantic phrase?
O you whom Greatness beckoned to . . .
O swollen Littleness
Who
turned from Immortality
To fawn upon Success!
O blind with love of self, who led
Youth's vision to defeat,
Bawling
and brawling for rewards,
Loud, in the common street!
O you who were so quick to judge--
Leader, and loved, of yore--

Hear now the judgment of our youth:
Leader and Chief no
more!
THE BAYONET
(1914)
THE great guns slay from a league away, the deathbolts
fly unseen,
And bellowing hill replies to hill, machine to brute
machine,
But still in the end when the long lines bend and
the battle hangs in doubt
They take to the steel in the same old way
that
their fathers fought it out--
It is man to man and breast to breast and
eye
to bloodshot eye
And the reach and twist of the thrusting wrist, as

it was in the days gone by!
Along the shaken hills the guns their drumming
thunder roll--
But the keen blades thrill with the lust to kill
that leaps from the slayer's soul!
For hand and heart and living steel, one pulse of
hate they feel.
Is your clan afraid of the naked blade? Does it
flinch from the bitter steel?
Perish your dreams of conquest then,
your swollen
hopes and bold,
For empire dwells with the stabbing blade, as it
did in the days of old!
THE BUTCHERS AT PRAYER
(1914)
EACH nation as it draws the sword
And flings its standard to the air

Petitions piously the Lord--
Vexing the void abyss with prayer.
O irony too deep for mirth!
O posturing apes that rant, and dare

This antic attitude! O Earth,
With your wild jest of wicked prayer!
I dare not laugh . . . a rising swell
Of laughter breaks in shrieks
somewhere--
No doubt they relish it in Hell,
This cosmic jest of
Earth at prayer!
SHADOWS
HAUNTED
(THE GHOST SPEAKS)

A GHOST is the freak of a sick man's brain?
Then why do ye start
and shiver so?
That's the sob and drip of a leaky drain?
But it
sounds like another noise we know!
The heavy drops drummed red
and slow,
The drops ran down as slow as fate--
Do ye hear them
still?--it was long ago!--
But here in the shadows I wait, I wait!
Spirits there be that pass in peace;
Mine passed in a whorl of wrath
and dole;
And the hour that your choking breath shall cease
I will
get my grip on your naked soul--
Nor pity may stay nor prayer
cajole--
I would drag ye whining from Hell's own gate:
To me, to
me, ye must pay the toll!
And here in the shadows I wait, I wait!
The dead they are dead, they are out of the way?
And a ghost is the
whim of an ailing mind?
Then why did ye whiten with fear to-day

When ye heard a voice in the calling wind?
Why did ye falter and
look behind
At the creeping mists when the hour grew late?
Ye
would see my face were ye stricken blind!
And here in the shadows I
wait, I wait!
Drink and forget, make merry and boast,
But the boast rings false and
the jest is thin--
In the hour that I meet ye ghost to ghost,
Stripped
of the flesh that ye skulk within,
Stripped to the coward soul 'ware of
its sin,
Ye shall learn, ye shall learn, whether dead men
hate!
Ah, a weary time has the waiting been,
But here in the
shadows I wait, I wait!
A NIGHTMARE
LEAGUES before me, leagues behind,
Clamor warring wastes of
flood,
All the streams of all the worlds
Flung together, mad of
mood;
Through the canon beats a sound,
Regular of interval,

Distant, drumming, muffled, dull,
Thunderously rhythmical;
Crafts slip by my startled soul--
Soul that cowers, a thing apart--


They are corpuscles of blood!
That's the throbbing of a heart!
God
of terrors!--am I mad?--
Through my body, mine own soul,

Shrunken to an atom's size,
Voyages toward an unguessed goal!
THE MOTHER
THE mother by the gallows-tree,
The gallows-tree, the gallows-tree,

(While the twitching body mocked the sun)
Lifted to Heaven her
broken heart
And called for sympathy.
Then Mother Mary bent to her,
Bent from her place by God's left side,

And whispered: "Peace--do I not know?--
My son was crucified!"
"O Mother Mary," answered she,
"You cannot, cannot enter in
To
my soul's woe--you cannot know--
For your son wrought no sin!"
(And