Miscellany of Poetry | Page 7

are, my dear??(Hush, for the wind may hear.)
Yet--?Other women wait?Their doors ajar;?And listen, listen, listen,?For the gate,?And murmur, "Soon, the war?Will seem a far,?Dim agony of sleep."
May I be joyful, too,?That day,?For love of you?May I not turn away?Nor--weep.

JOHN DRINKWATER
MALEDICTION
Thrush, across the twilight?Here in the abbey close,?Pouring from your lilac-bough?Note on pebbled note,?Why do you sing so,?Making your song so bright.?Swelling to a throbbing curve?That brave little throat?
Soon, but a season brief,?The lice among your feathers,?Stiff-winged and aimless-eyed,?With song dead you shall fall;?Refuse of some clotted ditch,?Seeking no more berries;?Why with lyric numbers now?Do you the twilight call?
Proud in your tawny plumes?Mottled in devising,?Singing as though never sang?Bird in close till now--?Sharp are the javelins?Of death that are seeking,?Seeking even simple birds?On a lilac-bough.
Crushed, forlorn, a frozen thing,?For no more nesting,?For no more speckled eggs?In pattered cup of clay,--?Soon your song shall come to this?You who make the twilight yours,?And echoes of the abbey,?At the end of day.
In the song I hear it,?The thud of a poor feathered death,?In the swelling throat I see?The splintering of song--?What demon then has worked in me?To tease my brain to bitterness--?In me who have loved bird and tree?So long, so long?
Until I come to charity,?Until I find peace again,?My curse upon the fiend or god?That will not let me hear?A bird in song upon the bough?But, hovering about the notes,?There chimes the maniac beating?Of black-winged fear.
SPECTRAL
What will the years tell??Hush! If it would but speak--?That shadow athwart the stream,?In the gloom of a dream;
Could my brain but spell?The thought in the brain of that weak?Old ghost that hides in the gloom,?Over there, of the chestnut bloom.
I sit in the broad June light?On the open bank of the river,?In the summer of manhood, young;?And over the water bright?Is a lair that is overhung?With coned pink blooms that quiver?And droop, till the water's breast?Is of petal and leaf caressed.
And the June sky glares on my prime--?But there in the gloom, with Time,?Huddled, with Time on its back,?Is a shadow that is my wrack.?Yes, it is I in the lair,?Peering and watching me there.
Under the chestnut bloom?My old age hides in the gloom.?And the years to be have been,?Could I spell the lore of that brain.?But the river flows between,?Over the weeds of pain,?Over the snares of death,?Maybe, should I leap to hold,?With myself grown old,?Council there in the gloom?Under the chestnut bloom.
And so, with instruction none,?I go, and leave it there,?My ghost with Time in its lair,?And the things that must yet be done?Tear at my heart unknown,?And the years have tongues of stone?With no syllable to make?For consolation's sake.
But peradventure yet?I shall return?To dare the weeds of death,?And plunge through the coned pink bloom,?And cry on that spectre set?In its silent ring of gloom,?And stay my youth to learn?The thing that my old age saith.

WILFRED WILSON GIBSON
IN WAR TIME
1
TROOPSHIP, (s.s. Baltic: Mid-Atlantic: July, 1917)
Dark waters into crystalline brilliance break?About the keel, as through the moonless night?The dark ship moves in its own moving lake?Of phosphorescent cold moon-coloured light;?And to the clear horizon, all around?Drift pools of fiery beryl flashing bright?As though, still flashing, quenchless, cold and white,?A million moons in the dark green waters drowned.
And staring at the magic with eyes adream,?That never till now have looked upon the sea,?Boys from the Middle-West lounge listlessly?In the unlanterned darkness, boys who go?Beckoned by some unchallengeable gleam?To unknown lands to fight an unknown foe.
2
THE CONSCRIPT.
Indifferent, flippant, earnest, but all bored,?The doctors sit in the glare of electric light?Watching the endless stream of naked white?Bodies of men for whom their hasty award?Means life or death, maybe, or the living death?Of mangled limbs, blind eyes or darkened brain:?And the chairman, as his monocle falls again,?Pronounces each doom with easy, indifferent breath.
Then suddenly they all shudder as they see?A young man move before them wearily,?Pallid and gaunt as one already dead;?And they are strangely troubled as he stands?With arms outstretched and drooping, thorn-crowned head,?The nail-marks glowing in his feet and hands.
3
AIR-RAID.
Night shatters in mid-heaven: the bark of guns,?The roar of planes, the crash of bombs, and all?The unshackled skiey pandemonium stuns?The senses to indifference, when a fall?Of masonry near by startles awake,?Tingling wide-eyed, prick-eared, with bristling hair,?Each sense within the body crouched aware?Like some sore-hunted creature in the brake.
Yet side by side we lie in the little room,?Just touching hands, with eyes and ears that strain?Keenly, yet dream-bewildered, through tense gloom,?Listening in helpless stupor of insane?Drugged nightmare panic fantastically wild,?To the quiet breathing of our sleeping child.
4
IN WAR-TIME.
As gaudy flies across a pewter plate,?On the grey disk of the unrippling sea,?Beneath an airless, sullen sky of slate?Dazzled destroyers zig-zag restlessly,?While underneath the sleek and livid tide,?Blind monsters nosing through the soundless deep,?Lean submarines among blind fishes glide?And through primeval weedy forests sweep.
Over the hot grey surface of my mind?Glib,