Miscellany of Poetry | Page 8

motley rumours zig-zag without rest,?While deep within the darkness of my breast?Monstrous desires, lean, sinister and blind,?Slink through unsounded night and stir the slime?And ooze of oceans of forgotten time.
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RAGTIME.
A minx in khaki struts the limelit boards:?With false moustache, set smirk and ogling eyes?And straddling legs and swinging hips she tries?To swagger it like a soldier, while the chords?Of rampant ragtime jangle, clash, and clatter;?And over the brassy blare and drumming din?She strains to squirt her squeaky notes and thin?Spirtle of sniggering lascivious patter.
Then out into the jostling Strand I turn,?And down a dark lane to the quiet river,?One stream of silver under the full moon,?And think of how cold searchlights flare and burn?Over dank trenches where men crouch and shiver.?Humming, to keep their hearts up, that same tune.
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LEAVE.
Crouched on the crowded deck, we watch the sun?In naked gold leap out of a cold sea?Of shivering silver; and stretching drowsily?Crampt legs and arms, relieved that night is done?And the slinking, deep-sea peril past, we turn?Westward to see the chilly, sparkling light?Quicken the Wicklow Hills, till jewel-bright?In their Spring freshness of dewy green they burn.
And silent on the deck beside me stands?A soldier, lean and brown, with restless hands,?And eyes that stare unkindling on the life?And rapture of green hills and glistening morn:?He comes from Flanders home to his dead wife,?And I, from England, to my son newborn.
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BACCHANAL
(November, 1918)
Into the twilight of Trafalgar Square?They pour from every quarter, banging drums?And tootling penny trumpets: to a blare?Of tin mouth-organs, while a sailor strums?A solitary banjo, lads and girls,?Locked in embraces, in a wild dishevel?Of flags and streaming hair, with curdling skirls?Surge in a frenzied, reeling, panic revel.
Lads who so long have looked death in the face,?Girls who so long have tended death's machines,?Released from the long terror shriek and prance:?And watching them, I see the outrageous dance,?The frantic torches and the tambourines?Tumultuous on the midnight hills of Thrace.

LOUIS GOLDING
SHEPHERD SINGING RAGTIME
The shepherd sings:--
"_Way down in Dixie,?Way down in Dixie,?Where the hens are dog-gone glad to lay_ ..."
With shaded eyes he stands to look?Across the hills where the clouds swoon,?He singing, leans upon his crook,?He sings, he sings no more.?The wind is muffled in the tangled hairs?Of sheep that drift along the noon.?One mild sheep stares?With amber eyes about the pearl-flecked June.?Two skylarks soar?With singing flame?Into the sun whence first they came.?All else is only grasshoppers?Or a brown wing the shepherd stirs,?Who, like a tall tree moving, goes?Where the pale tide of sheep-drift flows.
See! the sun smites?With sea-drawn lights?The turned wing of a gull that glows?Aslant the violet, the profound?Dome of the mid-June heights.
Alas! again the grasshoppers,?The birds, the slumber-winging bees,?Alas! again for those and these?Demure and sweet things drowned;?Drowned in vain raucous words men made?Where no lark rose with swift and sweet?Ascent and where no dim sheep strayed?About the stone immensities,?Where no sheep strayed and where no bees?Probed any flowers nor swung a blade
Of grass with pollened feet.
He sings:--
"_In Dixie,?Way down in Dixie,?Where the hens are dog-gone glad to lay?Scrambled eggs in the new-mown hay_..."
The herring-gulls with peevish cries?Rebuke the man who sings vain words;?His sheep-dog growls a low complaint,?Then turns to chasing butterflies.?But when the indifferent singing-birds?From midmost down to dimmest shore?Innumerably confirm their songs,?And grasshoppers make summer rhyme?And solemn bees in the wild thyme?Clash cymbals and beat gongs,?The shepherd's words once more are faint,?The shepherd's song once more is thinned?Upon the long course of the wind,?He sings, he sings no more.
Ah, now the sweet monotonies?Of bells that jangle on the sheep?To the low limit of the hills!?Till the blue cup of music spills?Into the boughs of lowland trees;?Till thence the lowland singings creep?Into the silenced shepherd's head,?Creep drowsily through his blood:?The young thrush fluting all he knows,?The ring-dove moaning his false woes,?Almost the rabbit's tiny tread,?The last unfolding bud.
But now,?Now a cool word spreads out along the sea.?Now the day's violet is cloud-tipped with gold.?Now dusk most silently?Fills the hushed day with other wings than birds'.?Now where on foam-crest waves the seagulls rock,?To their cliff-haven go the seagulls thence.?So too the shepherd gathers in his flock,?Because birds journey to their dens,?Tired sheep to their still fold.?A dark first bat swoops low and dips?About the shepherd who now sings?A song of timeless evenings;?For dusk is round him with wide wings,?Dusk murmurs on his moving lips.
_There is not mortal man who knows?From whence the, shepherd's song arose:?It came a thousand years ago.
Once the world's shepherds woke to lead?The folded sheep that they might feed?On green downs where winds blow.
One shepherd sang a golden word.?A thousand miles away one heard.?One sang it swift, one sang it slow._
_Three skylarks heard, three skylarks told?All shepherds this same song of gold?On all downs where winds blow.
This is the song that shepherds must?Sing till the green downlands be dust?And tide of sheep-drift no more flow:
The song three