The Chinese Nightingale | Page 9

sky."?Then he pulled out the nails. He shouted "Come in."?To heal me there stepped in a lady of sin.?Her hand was in mine. We walked in the sun.?She said: "Now forget them, the Saxon and Hun.?You are dreary and aged and silly and weak.?Let us smell the sweet groves. Let the summertime speak."?We walked to the river. We swam there in state.?I was a serpent. She was my mate.?I forgot in the marsh, as I tumbled about,?That trial in my room, where I did not hold out.?Since I was a serpent, my mate seemed to me?As a mermaiden seems to a fisher at sea,?Or a whisky soaked girl to a whisky soaked king.?I woke. She had turned to a ravening thing?On the table -- a buzzard with leperous head.?She tore up my rhymes and my drawings. She said:?"I am your own cheap bankrupt soul.?Will you die for the nations, making them whole??We joy in the swamp and here we are gay.?WILL YOU BRING YOUR FINE PEACE TO THE NATIONS TODAY?"
"This, My Song, Is Made for Kerensky"
(Being a Chant of the American Soap-Box and the Russian Revolution.)
O market square, O slattern place,?Is glory in your slack disgrace??Plump quack doctors sell their pills,?Gentle grafters sell brass watches,?Silly anarchists yell their ills.?Shall we be as weird as these??In the breezes nod and wheeze?
Heaven's mass is sung,?Tomorrow's mass is sung?In a spirit tongue?By wind and dust and birds,?The high mass of liberty,?While wave the banners red:?Sung round the soap-box,?A mass for soldiers dead.
When you leave your faction in the once-loved hall,?Like a true American tongue-lash them all,?Stand then on the corner under starry skies?And get you a gang of the worn and the wise.?The soldiers of the Lord may be squeaky when they rally,?The soldiers of the Lord are a queer little army,?But the soldiers of the Lord, before the year is through,?Will gather the whole nation, recruit all creation,?To smite the hosts abhorred, and all the heavens renew --?Enforcing with the bayonet the thing the ages teach --?Free speech!?Free speech!
Down with the Prussians, and all their works.?Down with the Turks.?Down with every army that fights against the soap-box,?The Pericles, Socrates, Diogenes soap-box,?The old Elijah, Jeremiah, John-the-Baptist soap-box,?The Rousseau, Mirabeau, Danton soap-box,?The Karl Marx, Henry George, Woodrow Wilson soap-box.?We will make the wide earth safe for the soap-box,?The everlasting foe of beastliness and tyranny,?Platform of liberty: -- Magna Charta liberty,?Andrew Jackson liberty, bleeding Kansas liberty,?New-born Russian liberty: --?Battleship of thought,?The round world over,?Loved by the red-hearted,?Loved by the broken-hearted,?Fair young Amazon or proud tough rover,?Loved by the lion,?Loved by the lion,?Loved by the lion,?Feared by the fox.
The Russian Revolution is the world revolution.?Death at the bedstead of every Kaiser knocks.?The Hohenzollern army shall be felled like the ox.?The fatal hour is striking in all the doomsday clocks.?The while, by freedom's alchemy?Beauty is born.?Ring every sleigh-bell, ring every church bell,?Blow the clear trumpet, and listen for the answer: --?The blast from the sky of the Gabriel horn.
Hail the Russian picture around the little box: --?Exiles,?Troops in files,?Generals in uniform,?Mujiks in their smocks,?And holy maiden soldiers who have cut away their locks.?All the peoples and the nations in processions mad and great, Are rolling through the Russian Soul as through a city gate: -- As though it were a street of stars that paves the shadowy deep. And mighty Tolstoi leads the van along the stairway steep.
But now the people shout:?"Hail to Kerensky,?He hurled the tyrants out."?And this my song is made for Kerensky,?Prophet of the world-wide intolerable hope,?There on the soap-box, seasoned, dauntless,?There amid the Russian celestial kaleidoscope,?Flags of liberty, rags and battlesmoke.
Moscow and Chicago!?Come let us praise battling Kerensky,?Bravo! Bravo!?Comrade Kerensky the thunderstorm and rainbow!?Comrade Kerensky, Bravo, Bravo!
August, 1917.
Fourth Section?Tragedies, Comedies, and Dreams
Our Guardian Angels and Their Children
Where a river roars in rapids?And doves in maples fret,?Where peace has decked the pastures?Our guardian angels met.
Long they had sought each other?In God's mysterious name,?Had climbed the solemn chaos tides?Alone, with hope aflame:
Amid the demon deeps had wound?By many a fearful way.?As they beheld each other?Their shout made glad the day.
No need of purse delayed them,?No hand of friend or kin --?Nor menace of the bell and book,?Nor fear of mortal sin.
You did not speak, my girl,?At this, our parting hour.?Long we held each other?And watched their deeds of power.
They made a curious Eden.?We saw that it was good.?We thought with them in unison.?We proudly understood
Their amaranth eternal,?Their roses strange and fair,?The asphodels they scattered?Upon the living air.
They built a house of clouds?With skilled immortal hands.?They entered through the silver doors.?Their wings were wedded brands.
I labored up the valley?To granite mountains free.?You hurried down the river?To Zidon by the sea.
But at their place of meeting?They keep a home and shrine.?Your angel twists a purple flax,?Then weaves a mantle fine.
My angel, her defender?Upstanding, spreads the light?On painted