Miscellany of Poetry | Page 8

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, 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.
5
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.
6

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.
7
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