r^" . •^o^ " • t • a "^ <\^ • • • * '^^ \/ /■ . J. « • • * *G' >^ ''f ^^0^ ^oV' ^^0^ o.r^^*' ^0^ v^^rif?'*.^'^ :o ^^-./^ ; ^o. '^*.. ''^i^^'^- • .♦^'V. « PROCESSIONALS By JOHN CURTIS UNDERWOOD ^For the mind of man is marching past ■perdition through the night" MITCHELL KENNERLEY NEW YORK:: MCMXV COPYRIGHT, 191 5, BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY MAY -I !9I5 PRINTED BY VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY BINGHAMTON, NEW YORK CU;i!)782 5 IN MEMORIAM LOUIS POTTER OBIT MCMXII FOREWORD Leading the long procession through the midnight, Man that was ether, fire, sea, germ and ape, Out of the aeons blind of slime emerging. Out of the aeons black when will went groping. Finding the fire, was fused to human shape. Heading the dreary marches through dark ages; Where the rest perished that the rest might be, Out of the aeons raw and red of bloodshed, Man that was caveman, found the stars. Forever Man to the stars goes marching from the sea. Man that was caveman mounts, and makes, and measures. Atoms and oceans rules. And to his will Storms and the stars pay tribute. All we bring thee, To thy last altar Life, today. Adoring To our last breath we lift our living still. All that we learned and loved we bring and bless thee; All of our toils and tears to pay thy price. All of our sins and shames are thine. Forever Man that was slave goes marching forth to freedom. Till his last triumph turns to sacrifice. Peconic, g-2^-14 CONTENTS COSMICS LES FORTS THE WEAK ARCHANGELS THE SUMMIT OLYMPIADE REVENANTS ADVENTURERS SAILORS SOLDIERS PRIESTS MODERNS A PORTRAIT THE TEST TUBE THE NEW STAR SCIENCE AND THE EDITOR BURNT SACRIFICE THE BRIDGE BUILDER CONGRESS CONVENES COMMENCEMENT PAGE 3 6 9 12 15 i8 20 23 25 28 33 35 37 40 43 44 47 49 CONTENTS THE POLICE MAGISTRATE THE PUBLIC LIBRARY WOMEN HELEN MANNEQUINS THE HANDMAID LA GITANA ANNUNCIATION A WOMAN BEDTIME THE OLD MOTHER HER BIRTHDAY EVE ARTS THE LEADER THE RECITAL THE DEAD SCULPTOR THE SECRET THE TOUCHSTONE THE SICK EDITOR ART IN THE SLUMS THE CURATOR PICTURES FOR MEN TRUTH REGIONAL LITTLE BRIDES OF MARY PAGE 55 59 61 63 64 67 68 71 72 74 76 81 84 87 89 91 93 96 98 lOI 104 109 CONTENTS PAGE THE HOST IN THE HILLS III KARMA 114 BISKRA 116 COVENT GARDEN 119 THE SALESMAN 121 NATURE AND THE PIT 123 APRIL IN THE LUXEMBOURG 125 SOLDIERS OF LIFE 127 EMIGRANTS 130 THE OPEN QUESTION THE OPEN QUESTION 135 SURVIVAL 137 HEART OF FIRE 140 THE LAST VISTA 143 SANCTUARY 144 MARKING TIME 146 THE SOUL HUNTER 149 TOMORROW^ 152 PRACTICAL PEOPLE 154 TOYLAND 157 PAIN THE CANCER WARD 161 CHRIST IN THE ASYLUM 164 MILL CHILDREN 166 GUTTER SLIME 168 CAMP FOLLOVV^ERS 170 CONTENTS PAGE THE BREAD LINE i73 THE LOCK-STEP 176 IN HOSPITAL 179 THE OLD 181 BLIND 184 PEOPLE COMMUTERS 189 NINE O'CLOCK 192 THE WIRETAPPER 194 THE AIRMAN 196 THE SIGNAL TOWER 199 THE CONSTRUCTION GANG 202 THE LINESMAN 204 THE ACCOUNTANT 207 MOVIES 210 THE PIT 213 MOODS KINSHIP AT DAVOS 219 A REST 221 FLOOD TIDE 223 PLEIN AIR 225 SATURDAY'S TRAIN 227 WELCOME 230 CHILDREN 232 BED RIDDEN 235 PLAY RITUAL 237 MACHINE MADE 240 CONTENTS THINGS PAGE THE EARTH MAN ^ 245 AURORA 247 THE GOLDEN GIRL 249 THE GARGOYLES 251 THE STONE PILE 254 FLEET MANCEUVRES 256 GLOUCESTER SCHOONERS 259 THE ROAD 261 THE OVERLAND TRAIL 265 THE OLD HOUSE 269 ENVOY 272 COSMICS LES FORTS WE were spawned in lava mountains. From the surf line of the sea, We were cast on desert islands when the world began to be. Rocks were hard to make us harder. Storms were strong to make us strong. And our will was set and tempered where the frosts were sore and long. Glaciers drove us. We retreated till we overtopped the snow. Past the passes pierced the mountains: found the valleys warm below. We went marching past perdition w^ith a purpose ill conceived Till we made us gods of granite, and a Law that we believed. Then we made us camps and cities, for our cattle, for our wives. And we found us gold and silver, and we purchased power with lives. And w^e made us ships and seamen. Master craftsmen we became. And we wrought us arts and letters; blew a bubble that was fame. 3 4 LES FORTS And our strength became our weakness. We were wasted In the night. And we lost the stars in lewdness that blasphemed all law and light. And we bred us filth and fevers till our children were as slaves In the streets of dying cities, and our gods we laid in graves. Still we lusted for the open, for the sea, and for the sun. There we marveled at the mountains and the deeds that men have done. There we sought a Voice, a Vision; till our doctors of disease Out of travail pangs of ages brought to birth a • Soul that sees: Made a mind that masters slowly want and weakness, storm and time: Wrests her secrets from the midnight; fills all space with rythm and rhyme: Tears the rotting veils of vision from its Truth it dares to face : Sees in man his own salvation, finds in fear its last dis- grace : LES FORTS 5 Binds new burdens on the strong, and sets them sterner handicaps; Spends their strength in ceaseless striving till they meet the great Perhaps; Lends itself to lift the fallen in its last crusade of light. For the mind of man is marching past perdition through the night. Marseilles, ^-21-14 THE WEAK WE were born of night and terror in a wilderness of fear. We were made to be your burdens till your tyrants disappear. Hatred, greed, despair, for ages were our grandams and our sires: We were mangled in the mountains, ringed around with frosts and fires. Starving men begat in horror our forerunners weak as we. Sickly mothers gave us suck. We lost our brothers in the sea. We were seized and we were shaken by a million mouths of pain. We were trapped and we were taken, and in torment we were slain. We were slaves to lusts that slew us slowly. We were slaves to toil. Chain gangs marched across the meadows. Rotting figs and rancid oil Were our rations. We went naked in the galleys, in the sun. We were slaves to lies that slew us slowly, surely, one by one. 6 THE WEAK 7 Slaves to gods debased, like devils in our masters' coward minds ; Old traditions, superstitions, idols born of prayer that blinds ; Creeds as cruel as their quenchless hell; the scapegoats of their sins. Making of its fears a fetish, slowly life to freedom wins. We are slaves that snap their fetters, one by one, and year by year. We come stumbling from our dungeons till the sun and stars appear. Weary, wounded, falling, dying, in your streets of lies obscene, We go groping through the shadows to a land where life is clean. Little children in your mills, and babies butchered in your streets. Men in mines you doom to darkness; women, life's last vile defeats. Lawyers, liars, scribes and teachers who a nation's soul betray ; Perjured priests and healers, slowly stumbling toward the light of day. 8 THE WEAK So we have defiled for ages out of darkness. Now we see New salvation made for millions, nearer. So our thoughts go free. Year by year you cure our bodies; teach our rotting souls to know Will, that mind shall make immortal, life's last fear shall overthrow. We were weak to make you stronger. Like your children we shall grow. Peconic, j-ji-14 B ARCHANGELS Y the bones that fell before them they were blooded to the trail, By the ghosts that dared the desert, dying they have grasped the grail. Like the substance lost of corals slowly risen from the sea, By the faith that failed and faltered we were fitted to be free. By a star that's dead two thousand year, you steer across the night. By the force of fallen waters I am switching on the light In my study that's a temple and a treasure house of souls, Where the strongest still are silent in the shadows of their goals. Standing armies, rank on rank of truth eternal. Round the walls, Round the shelves a light unearthly, spraj^ed like radium, lifts and falls. There they stand in silent test tubes charged with chemicals of thought. Elements of life, its cultures, oiit of chaos slowly wrought. Force that's free from flesh forever, cells of one immortal Mind; 9 lo ARCHANGELS Man that forth from night and ether, word by word his faith defined. Word by word — the apes have chattered — word by word of fraud and fear, From the shamans, from the sibyls, from the priests we had to hear. Year by year we broke their idols, broke their shackles, fought the shades; Fought with beasts in light's arena, every lie that life degrades. Blow by blow we rent the barriers, step by step more near we trod To the threshold of tomorrow and the secrets gray of God. Word by word we wrote our gospels, line by line our letters set. Lost illusions, loves and lustings, forced the feeble to forget : Found a force that growing stronger still than atom, germ or star; Cringing once in shame to shadows, stands that truth whose thoughts we are. Here its shrine and here its powerhouse waits till all our lines are laid, ARCHANGELS ii Dynamos and coils connected, through a world that sick, afraid, Shaken with the crash of churches, dumb with anguish longs to see Sunlight in its shameful places. Here our surgeons set you free, Snap your shackles. Thought forever and the work of thought alone, Earth outliving, serve the Highest; soar adoring round the throne. S.S. Chicago, 4-16-13 THE SUMMIT WE went climbing in the morning from the valleys, from the cities black of men. Something called us to the sky line, for the sky larks soared, the light was lifting then. We went climbing in the sunshine. We went singing. We went rivaling the sun. But our singing ceased, our throats were choked, our breath was battling long before the day was done. We went climbing from the shore line, from the shallows, the unsounded depths of sea, Where the corals, the crustaceans, the sea lizards, all our crawling life began to be. We went climbing through the shadows, through the jungles, where the tiger and the ape Lurked and lingered, watched and hungered, crawling, crouching, lest our stragglers should escape. We went climbing past the caves where first our fathers lit their fire. Fallen embers from their altars, hopeless hungers, flaming horrors, nursed the flame of our desire. We went climbing toward the snow peaks, toward the limits, toward the light beyond the snow; Beacons quenched and ruined watch towers labored past. At last we turned to watch the world below 12 THE SUMMIT 13 Where a cross stood sagging, slanting, slowly sinking by a bare deserted shrine. Close beside the open adit, like a hungry mouth of nothing of an old abandoned mine. We went climbing past the past that time has gutted, ending empty works and hollow creeds. We went climbing towards tomorrow, towards the truth that out of sorrow shapes our human, our immortal needs. One by one my brothers staggered, fell and lay; and dying drove us on before. Last my love and I alone were left till day grew grey, and tricked and tripped us more and more; Marred her face, her brave eyes hid. At last I lost her where a swirl of mist Mocked my eyes, my cries. But something pulsed within me, crept behind me, forced and flogged me to persist. Something cried " She may be strong and true, and stronger, truer too than you. You may meet her at the summit when the sunlight lights the falling fires of life that flame anew." We went climbing through the blackness until memory merged in pain that senseless struggle flayed away. 14 THE SUMMIT Climbing, clutching, creeping, kneeling; fainting, falling, rising, reeling ; with the weight of night I wrestled. Suddenly I won today. So despair I passed at last. Alone I scaled the summit: saw the dawn; Higher snow peaks, wider ranges, like the lines of God's gray gospel, like His secret thoughts withdrawn; Wrote my word in straggling letters ; piled my cairn with fingers numb; Watched the myriad marching banners of the sunrise up- ward come ; Gathered breath and tightened belt, and turned towards endless stairs of stone. Flaming up to Life's last summit, where the souls that live to struggle, where the strong in desolation, trace slow trails of truth alone. New York, 1-6-13 OLYMPIADE WE who are sons of the North, of the hills, of the woods, of the sea. Sons of the men that our earth has sent forth, Its makers and masters to be; This is our song, and the stress of our brain, the beat of our heart and the tread of our feet; That is wrought into triumph through toil and through pain, and the will that is steel when the mighty shall meet. Now the runners are poised. They are tense on their m.ark, like an orchestra tuning its strings; Till a pistol's report, like a spark in the dark, has spurred them and shod them with wings. And each movement Is music, each stride is a rhyme and a rhythm. And the beat and the scrape Of the feet on the track are like currents that chafe round the bends In their banks. Like a cape That is girdled by surf, the last corner Is turned. Like the race and the rush of the tides They break down the home stretch. The runner Isi breast- ing the tape. And his soul In his strides Sings the song of the blood, of the breath, of the brain, of the bones and the sinews and thews ; The song of the strong, of the fullness of life that Its forces must master and use; 15 i6 OLYMPIADE The song of the strength and the sleight of the hand, and the muscles like fighting men trained, That advance and retreat as the will gives the vs^ord, till the battle is draw^n or is gained. And the strong men advance to their trial. They are shrewd with their grapples and weights. And the wrestlers lie locked. They draw breath for a while. And the primitive terrors and hates Of the cave man who first cast a stone at despair, are this shot putter's sudden reserves. Like the head of a lance, like the fang of a snake, as he summons his sinews and nerves For one moment, one task, he is man; he is more; he Is all that creation has won Out of the chaos and night; one more lunge to the light; one more stride toward the stars and the sun. This Is the song of the blood, of the sire, of the son, of the sister, the mother, the wife ; All that flow by our sides like a river In flood, through the veins of a race that life strains out of strife. This is the song of the breed, of the lean Viking sea wolves by land and by sea, That ran round the world till they trained to succeed; that can master tomorrow and all that shall be. OLYMPIADE 17 And their footfalls are singing, their runnings are runes. And they run as the waves and the rivers must run; Like the wind and the rain and the throbbing of pain, like the winging of birds, like the light of the sun. And like rest after struggle, like sleep in the night; in the lull of the shouting, the pause of the song. Comes a moment immortal of love and delight in the souls of the thousands that echo the strong. Though the breath of the runner may falter and fail to- morrow, he lives to his limit today ; One note, and one word, and one stride on the trail of the race that must run till the stars shall decay. StockJiolnij '/-ig-12 REFENANTS THERE is a day of all the saints, and then A day of all the souls of God on earth, All the faint forms wherein He found himself Fulfilled ; or failed. The last warm wistful days, Drifting with haze and haloed with faint sunlight Summon them back to warm themselves and live. The year's last harvest has been set aside. Men gather its last gleamings. So they come To gleam behind us saving shreds of pity, And golden seeds of sorrows still unsuffered. We may remember them when autumn drives The leaves before him. They are frailer still. More than the leaves, innumerable, wan. Faint as the smoke of autumn fires that mounts To meet the haze, and dies before the daylight. These are the golden days of memory. The whole world makes its own before it buries The dying year in winter's drifted marble ; Days when they most have power to live in us. Endless processions passing from the past. Souls of strong sins and stronger loves and sorrows, Men whose hands made us; mothers of our mothers. Seen in our children's lips and eyes one second. i8 REV EN J NTS 19 This is their season, they who in our blood Clamor each hour; who knock at dead of night At our hard hearts; whose dead hands slay or save When we remember most, and most we need them. Then the w^arm world for winter's storms prepares; Till, like the drifting leaves, at last they vanish. Peconic, 6-1-14 ADVENTURERS \ ONCE we walked the windlass round, stamping to j the chantey's sound; sang to start her. \ Once we threw our dice with death; shifting ballast, \ trembling breath, strove to barter. | Burning mountains, islands far, where the trade wind's courses are, then we sighted: i Cities sacked and set afire. Lives we lost for love or hire. We have lighted Beacons bright in boyhood's eyes. Treasons shrewd with shrewder lies we requited. ^ Continents whose nerves were night, trail by trail we \ dragged to light. All we charted, \ Till today from pole to pole we have run and grasped \ our goal, restless hearted. i I What tomorrow shall we do, what assail and what pursue, where adventure? i All your life's a ledger page. And your earth is gray with | age. Law's indenture Makes your days the days of slaves. And your fathers from their graves their sons censure. .i When we force your last frontier, when our hearts for- getting fear, tame and cruel J ADVENTURERS 21 Grow as your sick souls have grown: how shall life win back its own, find new fuel? To the jungle said the farm, '' When your power to spoil and harm, all is ended; How shall I my limits know, where begin and cease to grow." Time defended Silently the jungle smiled, like a savage or a child, wild and splendid. This was so ere Rome was old. Before Babylon grew cold, men were asking ** Must we pay this price of peace? Shall, untried, our valor cease, legion-tasking? " Your barbarians begin, hordes without you and within, to beleaguer Every city you have built out of greed and blood and guilt. Bodies meager, Spirits weak as women fail. Life is tireless. Life is male. Life is eager. Clouds of gnats and airships soar, dive to death : but more and more life arises. Through the ether science-mined, lens and rays new marvels find, new surmises. 22 ADVENTURERS Life lines up your last reserves. Where the jungle in your nerves life is wasting. Where your sons degenerate clots of greed disintegrate, death foretasting; Every savage in the slum is a pledge of life to come, full, unhasting. War its thunder nearer rolls, soon to search and sift your souls. You who tame her Starve and make of peace a whore, where your millions men adore, stain and shame her. War is worship for the free. Since man first began to be, our endeavor. Legionaries, errant knights, pioneers, life's acolytes: rest- ing never. Seeking out its God unknown, till the last man dies alone ; lives forever. Los Angeles, 10-20-13 SAILORS OUT of the deep the waves rise up to praise Thee. Day after day the tides in high procession Singing their songs of praise, make earth an altar Under Thy boundless temple dome of sky. Year after year their multitudes adored Thee, Millions of lives obscured that lived to die. Nations of men innumerable served Thee; Out of their weakness wrought Thy ships and sailors; Out of their blindness found Thy farthest islands; Charted Thy coasts and foundered in Thy storms. Millions of ships they wrecked in mist and midnight. Out of Thy fogs a planet's vision forms. Now we have seen Thy breakers by Thy searchlights; Pricked on Thy maps Thy poles in due position ; Now we precisely make our weekly landfalls. Along Thy sea lanes steadily there go Thousands of ships In endless, swift procession; Bearing Thy burdens. Master, to and fro. We are Thy priests, O Lord. The rest forgetful Doze on Thy decks, and count their gains and losses. We are Thy priests. Thy spirit shares our watches Where in the fog Thy bergs are loosed to slay: Where In the night Thy rocks reach up to rend us. We are Thy priests O Lord, by night and day. 24 SAILORS We are Thy priests. We lead Thy people onward. Pluck them from listless cares to watch Thy wonders, Teach them to hear Thy voice in calms and thunders. Wave after wave we lift Thy host on high. We are Thy celebrants of stars and whirlwinds, Turned to Thy altar lights to see Thy sky. Pe conic, 6-3-14 SOLDIERS ONCE we fought on with fear and night with broken flints and boughs of trees. We forged us blades and shafts of light. With fire we slew our enemies. We led ten thousand men to fight where once we marched by twos and threes. Chieftains and kings we swept away. We brought our bleeding captives home, And gold and women. Yesterday our triumphs crowned the hills of Rome. Altars and arch in ruins lay, and time defiled each temple dome. Still we went marching on. We stood the sentinels of progress there On Nubian sands, in Dacian wood. When Rome brought home her last despair To meet the Hun's red brotherhood, we made our end an iron prayer. W"e made our discipline a law for later legions, pioneered New empires that the Spaniards saw, guarded his gods. Westward we steered. Felt English canvas slat and draw, till time's new world to truth appeared. 25 26 SOLDIERS We made New England. Born to be her Pilgrim spirits, ironsides Stern as her winters and her sea, we wrestled with her storms and tides. We took her forest, tree by tree, from death that in the darkness hides. We slew her savages. We went across the mountains and the plains, Marched on and made a continent for all the world : from our red veins Baptized your states. Our strength we spent to found this nation that remains. We freed the slave. Of death we made a sacrament, a brotherhood. Into his incense black and frayed the battle flags reeled on and stood ; Till our last dead to rest were laid before his altar. Hill and wood Still trenched and scarred, where spring is green, bear witness to our iron rites. We raised a temple vast, unseen. And there our brothers walk at night, And see the shames that crawl between their monuments. From starry heights SOLDIERS 27 They wait to watch their nation wake when God's red Sabbath comes again, When one by one His soldiers take His altar steps through iron rain; When women's hearts their martyrs make of freemen fallen not in vain. Your editors, with liar's souls blaspheme our service. Blind and slow Your Congress thins our muster rolls. Your aliens snarl. By this we know That Death shall take his double tolls when forth to God our banners go. Peconic, 6-4—14 w PRIESTS E waved torches In the night, we dealt in spells. We traded fear. We raised ghosts. We wrought with wizards, making portents black appear. We made lies and murder serve us, stealing power from far and near. Others bowed to Bacchus blindly. We their drunken madness led. Others gave their babes to Moloch; for our good they burned and bled. Others virgins to Astarte brought, to us, who never wed. We grew great by hoarding secrets, shared by us of earth and skies, Secrets of the hoards of others, secrets wrung from rest- less eyes. Secret shames, sick fears of mothers. In all wickedness made wise We grew rich ; but man grew strong. The wide black spider web of night Strand by strand in silence burning ; fire by fire, he fought to light. So we made us gods that left him damned forever in God's sight. 28 PRIESTS 29 lie grew greater. He grew tender, till a mother and a child Born to bless, he dreamed. And we betrayed his hopes, and love that smiled, Fearing hell that flamed forever; failed and died by us defiled. We set shackles on men's spirits. We weighed down their hearts with dread. Burned stray bodies at the stake, set thumb screws round man's fingers red. And with crippled fingers groping, man went marching on ahead. We forbade his mind to mount where we had taught his soul to crawl. Man that breaks his idols slowly, past each crumbling temple wall Looked beyond us to the stars, and found in slime new life for all. Whether Christ is better shrined in Rome or Moscow, now no more Rends men's lives. And men today a God of larger life adore. Life that batters down Its idols, they must build and battle for. '30 PRIESTS We are failing, we are falling, we that preach a god of lies. To the women, to the children, to the blind. In darkness dies Our dominion of the shadows, every shame that light denies. Now the world outgrowing fear no more can worship yesterday. Now it needs no more our creeds, nor prays as children blindly pray. Like all life extinct Thy martyrs are. Lord, we shall be as they. Peconic, 8-21-13 MODERNS A PORTRAIT DR. ALEXIS CARREL THE eyes behind the glasses look at you, They probe your flesh. They pierce your spirit through. You stand before a Jesuit In white, A new high priest of life's last order — Light. Since out of darkness came the will to be, The soul to suffer and the mind to see; Since life's long ladder leads us to today; Since ages lapse and nations pass away; Since from its ashes life renews its flame; Out of an ape's misshapen brain he came. He comes today to make the crooked straight, Out of a wilderness of lust and hate. He comes to heal the halt. The dumb shall speak. The blind shall see what still they dumbly seek. Man has all power. He holds the beating heart Torn from the breast. He takes the flesh apart To save the soul that tortured still survives. He works his miracles on modern lives. And out of pain, disease, despair, decay; He raises life and levers death away. 34 A PORTRAIT His scapels harrow highways hard of One Who waits till his forerunner's task is done. His brain records, his lenses life dissect, Till men a stronger Saviour still expect. For not to end in darkness evermore. Men rise from night and dreams of light adore. Today our surgeons triumph over pain. We shall see stronger surgeons of the brain, Surgeons of doubt, defeat; at last a Goal Won from this wilderness that wastes the soul. New York, 1-1-13 THE TEST TUBE HERE is chaos swiftly whirling where a Bunsen burner's flame Sets a million atoms swirling, atoms that from ether came ; Flame from sunlight man-sublimed that I might give my germ a name. Here my culture lives and spreads, and growing faster day by day, Drives one dread of all man's dreads of death and night and cold away, Till an antitoxin new once more rekindles mortal clay. Here creation in this glass the aeons and the centuries In due season bring to pass perfectly. And such as these Fumes that swirl around each planet newly born, the Master sees. Once we fought with shapes of fear and life was frozen in the night. Till an ape that seared his hand, clutched a brand and clung to light. Once we dreamed that love alone, evil's essence could set right. Good and evil, twin, entwined, in this glass our lenses show ; 35 36 THE TEST TUBE Seeds of death by man refined to cure, not kill, at last we know. All processionals of atoms through the ages come and go: Through the ether, through the midnight, through the earth, through children pale, Warped and wasted in our slums till all creation seems to fail: Till their prayers, their sighs unheard, avail to make this glass a grail, Denver, 10-13-13 THE NEW STAR WE hold the upper places fast. On many a mountain height Our watch towers stand. We map the stars, we chart the curves of light Like men who saw o'er Bethlehem a new star in the night. We wander through the infinite, the wilderness of space, To worship Truth revealed to man, a spectrum new to trace. To find some planet fresh prepared to be Love's dwelling place. This world is old and full of sin and sickness, sure to die. It serves its purpose and it ends, the same as you and I, We are your Prophets who translate the gospel of the sky. Here on our conning tower of time, our turret of today. Searchlight and gun, artillery of truth, we serve and sway. We shell the midnight with men's minds till legions black give way. 37 38 THE NEW STAR For men of old steered by the stars o'er land and shore- less sea, And coast by coast their earth explored. And so today do we, Who sound the eddies of the skies till flesh and soul sail free. When coracles to gallej^s grew by Sidon and by Tyre; Our fathers pricked their parchment charts, they nursed a smothered fire, They lit their spirits at the stars, to struggle, starve, aspire. And not aloof and lone we are, nor far divorced as they From all that live upon the land, that walk the human way, Who struggle, strive and stumble on, who all one law obey. We are your eyes but we have ears for human joy and pain. When surgeons like creators carve from chaos life again. When some new poet like a star appears, we too attain. We watch the faces of our wives new lit v/hile we dissect Both light and night, the very void, and life's last nerve detect. THE NEW STAR 39 And while our children smile we probe the love of God's elect. We measure life, but more w^e live, we feel the rising tide, The Brute that out of blackness born, that scarred and crucified, Sees star by star the Grail supreme that death shall fail to hide. New York, 12-24-12 SCIENCE AND THE EDITOR MEN should envy me you say for all I know and try to do: Test tubes, cultures, truth dissected. Well I wish that I were you With your fountain pen that probes, your hyperdermics, truth and lies; Subtle drugs that cure or kill the will, the mind, that you devise In this cosmic laboratory of the city that you daily rush and crush and stumble through. So you've heard this mongrel yelping. He was happy for a day. First we fed his puppy's paunch. Then Otto taught him how to play. Vivisected, racked to marrow, matter red disintegrates. But his heart inside a jar beats, and time's tenth hour awaits Ticking off the vital seconds until fools forget their folly, glimpse our goal that's stars away. Better dogs like life itself run like brooks, like sunbeams breed. Here this heart upon the shelf helps all manhood to suc- ceed. Anti-vivisection slush still you publish when it pays. 40 SCIENCE AND THE EDITOR 41 Fools will gush and weakness whimpers. Half your tribe the truth dismays. Human mongrels in perdition, souls by Wall Street vivi- sected, out of blindness man must lead. Redlight hearts in dingy jars, fingers grafted from a child To the race that clutches stars, by your cotton mills de- filed; All the raw tormented truth that you trade in; spirits bowed ; All the dreams profaned of youth your six inch headlines shriek aloud ; Fumes of heaven and hell together are in time's long laboratory, sublimated, reconciled. Test tubes, cultures, here are clean, deadly microbes though we brew. Yours are clouded and obscene. Antiseptics science knew Only yesterday, remember. Vice you've yet to segregate. Yes, and Greed : but little children from the tenements of hate. Can't we take from Satan's test tubes, rear in cultures clear as crystal, somehow, sometime, I and you ? Here's the section of an eye, the rest I grafted — cataract Cured completely. Millions die to leave one tiny lens in- tact. 42 SCIENCE AND THE EDITOR Graft the truth, man, fix and free it, clean and clear for minds that blink. Though you die the race shall see it, see with thoughts you dared to think. Maybe in his endless purpose, God shall save you from extinction, graft the slice of soul you lacked. Neiv York, 12-12-12 BURNT SACRIFICE GOD poured a beaker of His wrath today Into this casting pit, on human clay Lost in the flood of molten steel that leapt Out of the crucible. Two women wept, Their children wailed. And still these iron pulses beat Where hell's blast furnaces a nation's life blood heat. Two men were blotted out. Their funeral No mourners throng. No mother may recall How her son lay in death and smiled at her, Or tend his grave. Yet were they happier Than millions crushed to slime by man's obscene machine, Their lives were gray with grirrie. The death they died was clean. For these lost soldiers on life's firing line We have no tears ; a cautery divine Seared them away to cleanse our discontent. Some mighty bridge may be their monument. In death they live. But we, slavish and tyrannous. How shall our souls go free? How shall it profit us? New York, 10-14-12 43 o THE BRIDGE BUILDER NCE the powers that planned the oceans left an island near the shore In the angle vast, reentrant, reaching down from Labra- dor, At the West's great Watergate. And there Manhattan came to be, In the purpose plotting surely life for all on land and sea. Life was shipped from overseas, and there remained. Two cities there Reaching out struck hands together, held them clasped. They sent me where I went sinking caissons slowly, eighty feet below the day. Through the quicksand driving wedges, till my towers were under way. Once they built a tower at Babel. Babels twain I rose between, Tuned my cables, tightened trusses, till my symphony was seen. Strong, enduring, flawless, finished. Where the cities' noise grows still In midstream, midair, I made it, all its soul of steel athrill. Till the storms came up to shake it. Firn^ it stood. Each girder twanged 44 THE BRIDGE BUILDER 45 In the wind's wild orchestration. Where my hammers beat and clanged Every rivet held. And I and all my iron fighting men Knew that mind could bind the sky, knew that man was master then. Flawless where it stood I left it. Finished? No. The stage was there. Then began a greater building of that drama in the air, Millions stage each night and morning, when the wheels began to roll. In tomorrow's vast cathedral, just one pathway of the soul ; Just one aisle, I left to others. Men shall mount when I am dead. Life's procession past my piers shall march, and higher overhead See the towers of mightier builders. Yet this thing I left to be Strong, essential, fit for service as the mountains and the sea. Far, far inland my approaches slowly rise as millions rise. Up from bed rock, climbing slowly, come our towers to scale the skies. 46 THE BRIDGE BUILDER Like two shackled seraphs standing wing to wing they struggle still, Bridging man's last baffled ages, till tomorrow shall work our will. Neiv York, 6-^-14 CONGRESS CONVENES TWO clock hands meet. A chaplain blind invokes A god unknown men worship here with lies. The business of the session has begun. A man from Massachusetts has the floor: From Massachusetts: — once she stood for freedom. Her manufacturers and union leaders Deal with Rhode Island. Kansas intervenes, Insurgent, shrewd. Here farm must fight with mill, Mine with plantation, poverty with riches. Millions with human hearts and hopes that perish. Here is no senate stately, of free states. We have made here a clearing house of hatreds, Mean jealousies and petty greeds and fears. Of special interests, monstrous and minute. As these hard human lips and eyes of liars. These are our masks, our clowns, our Punchinellos: Puppets we play with blindly ; and the gods Look down and laugh at us who lavish here Our souls on shams. For underneath it all We live and love and see the stars at night. Even these husks contain the hearts of heroes. These monstrous paunches human entrails hide ; Something that sleeps and may be waked. And walkinj 47 48 CONGRESS CONVENES Like men asleep they offer gifts to Him Who out of endless patience shapes His planets. For slowly out of gluttony and lust, Blindness and greed, the sentient soul of man Wakens to wrongs and wider brotherhood, As the first cave man found a world outside His stagnant cave; and starward strode forever. Peconic, 5-2^-14 COMMENCEMENT THEY are coming from the chapel under trees where Lowell walked: Gownsmen all in slow procession. Here where Wendell Phillips talked, Winthrop, Adams, Hancock, Standish, Sumner, Evarts live again In the names and in the faces of these boys we turn to men. Alma Mater, first and oldest, in a world no longer new. Sternest in thy creed and coldest, striving, grasping, false and true: All the world demands an answer, law; a gospel here to- day: In thy eyes would see salvation. But thy gaze is turned away. All the world is working, striving. Suffering its children cry. Thou must search thy heart, assure us, lest the soul in us should die. All these faces, firm and wistful, feet that fall in cadenced beat, Bring thee nearer to thy moment of new triumph or de- feat. 49 50 COMMENCEMENT At thy word our sires for freedom falling, fifty years ago, Drifting in the wind of battle, where men's lives were lost like snow, Died. Today our war is greater; ghastlier loss its lords devise. Harder things than lead and steel we feel who reel and bow to lies. Hate and horror long besiege us. Doubt and error crept within, Spied within these halls where traitors hide; the restless hosts of sin Sap our walls. Aloof no longer we may bide. Our citadel Only can be won by soldiers, rallying where heaven and hell Wrestle through the world. We send them, these, our boys, our last, our best; Young, unfitted, blind, aspiring, fearless, to a nation's test. War is wreckage, rout and ruin. Drifting shreds of souls that fall Stumbling forth from shame to triumph, rallying shall hear thee call. Truth is militant and mighty. We her last reserves shall rise. COMMENCEMENT 51 Truth is fearless. We shall find her in these clear, un- conquered eyes. Truth is ours who free our spirits though our flesh in weak- ness dies. We shall march behind their shoulders, seeing in their eyes that see After struggle greater struggle, new Americas to be, Maimed and bleeding: till thy word is heard forever clear and free. New York, 6-8-14 THE POLICE MAGISTRATE THOU who the hearts of men dost weigh, the surgeon of our souls today, Whose headlines probe our rottenness : Thou that has set me here on high To scan the symptoms of our sins, to diagnose each choking cry Of truth and terror, horror, shame, and sin that lives alone to die; Making thy law a medicine for spirits sick, too tired to play ; Thou that dost make the mighty small, infected by the city's sins ; Making thy minor souls the same, the slaves of fear, and greed and lust; Making red murders merciful, that flowers might blossom from the dust; Making thy hero's hearts from hell, that men that die might learn to trust This people's tortured soul that still from wickedness to worship wins. Draw near to us and bear with us, in this, thy nation's hour of trial ; For Justice is made merchandise, and judges bought and sold like whores. 52 THE POLICE MAGISTRATE 53 They walk the streets with restless eyes. They enter in by secret doors. They live by power that trades in lies, and light and liberty deplores, And all the lovely things of life that in the shadows strive to smile. Their rottenness has left me here in thy law's ante-room ; not there Where in thy high courts, eyes benign and base, thine equal justice wrest. Lord, I was jealous for Thy truth. I dreamed that I might serve Thee best In dignity, and power and ease, where slowly men Thy pleadings test; Where all Thy last appeals are heard in larger light and ampler air. There in thy law's last balance room at Washington, the scales are set To weigh each thousandth part of truth ; and there nine men whose souls are thine, Make laboratory tests of law^, assay success and power malign ; Hand thy decisions down to earth. No longer, Lord, that goal is mine. 54 THE POLICE MAGISTRATE Here in Thy clinic drear, of crime, I learn to labor and forget. Here at first hand I deal with life. This power they missed I wield alone. Here by the altar of Thy law, old sins, old shames, old treasons stand: Mute supplicants, dumb hopes, sad eyes that see new light, a nobler land. For men still make tomorrow here. I hold its substance in my hand Until at last they cast me out, old age or evil, both Thine own. Peconic, 6—2-14 T THE PUBLIC LIBRARY HIS is our bank of learning modern and marble floored. And here I stand like a teller, and gods men once adored, Old rituals of idols, go blindly through my hands To a world that faith forgetting, today misunderstands. And fails to find in its making a larger law's commands. Here we have twenty talents stored and a thousand score. And to him that hath shall be given. We lend him more and more. And from him that lacks shall be taken. And the years shall strip away From the cheap and the tawdry faces the youth of yester- day, Readers of tales as vital as a child tells in his play. And the cheap and the childish credos, the old ancestral lies, We slowly learn to sublimate. And error's dark dis- guise, And the rotting husks and wrappings of truth that the simple see, We strip from her fair white body. We toil to set her free. For men made of truth a mummy once and cheated you and me. 55 56 THE PUBLIC LIBRARY This is our city's clinic for its deaf and dumb and blind. This is our laboratory where new germs of thought we find. And one man's mind is a microscope. One strong soul soars afar, And hales us healing sure and hope, from the orbit of a star, One larger letter of the law, whose servants all we are. We all are the law's small servants; atoms of life today, Like the flowers that fade upon my desk, and that child that turns away Stunted, pale, consumptive, with her heaven In her eye, Hugging her book of fairy tales. And she loves each golden lie. But the world outgrows its fairy tales. And the child must grow or die. Day after day they come and go, the crude, the cheap, the young. With their little pitiful poets, and their songs long since outsung. And the God of all light and glory, who caused His stars to be. Does He read each childish story that they write for you and me? This is His laboratory, where He toils to set men free. Pe conic, 6-22-14 WOMEN HELEN FLOWERS — I cannot bear them for they fade. Their fragrance is of death — their fading petals Are clods of earth time flings on beauty's coffin. For in the full unfolding of the rose, There comes a time when the least breath of air, The echo of a word, may be her end And I am near it. All I have today Tomorrow is the wind's, — Be merciful. I have been beautiful and known no mercy. I have been happy, if this happiness Be blooming in the sunlight like a rose. Sufficient in itself. But he who gave Dew to His roses, gave to souls like mine A martyrdom of mirrors, and of tears. Here where I watched my woman's blossoming. Here where I planned my triumphs and fulfilled them, Time turns his first least thread of that torment. I Am made my own soul's executioner. My mirror is my rack — and I shall see When the scars show, the springtime and the dawn ; And how I wasted them. And I shall call Out of my agony, to lovers dead — And to the living this one word. " Remember " ! 59 6o HELEN And some of them shall hear me. Some of them Shall see me in their dreams, and make of me An image and a song of suffering, Their agony and mine, too true to die; Poignant and timeless as the spring herself ; — Where men shall see me walking and shall worship What I once was in other eyes — forever. Seattle, 1 2-5-1 3 MANNEQUINS PALE slaves that swell the triumph of your Pagan emperor Poiret, Weak captives of your caliph, Worth, around your Roman ring we go. When Satan's big department store has staged its harness women's show. When Easter brings its blossoms forth. Outside the world is making May, And bending to the baby buds, pale sunbeams and frail breezes play. God gave me brains to see myself as others see. He gave me curves that catch the eye, a face that lures and hair that flames, A heart that trembles through the streets, that shivers at their sudden shames. He made twenty and unloved, in Satan's dress parade to be Forever hungry and alone. What hope on earth is there for me? For prostitutes are on their own. But we who walk your tread mill here Are made your slaves at second hand, the sport of every eye that rolls. Sleek odalisques of lust that calls to stronger lust to take his tolls: 6i 62 MANNEQUINS Smeared mirrors of your evil souls that come and stare and disappear: Until the best of us becomes a creeping pest of greed and fear. / Here in our last sad circle of your new inferno, Dante's brain, That wrote in gall and venom, failed to guess our griev- ance and despair: These robes of princess-prostitutes, that painted flesh is proud to wear, That Paris and its panders sell. You whisper, smile and sneer. Again You go your way, the weight you swell of all life's pov- erty and pain. You leave us for your meaner ends, who wear our livery of shame Around your Roman ring outside, where you are slaves no less than we. To us through sunless windows floats one breath of April and the sea, Of woods where pine trees fringe the sky. You make life cruel, vile and tame. Till God and man and devil die ; where woman most must bear the blame. Hong-kong, 1-2 1- 1 4 THE HANDMAID I TRY to say as Mary said, " Behold the handmaid of the Lord, A smile upon her lips, and dread Within her heart, — a sword. Today he walked, he came to me, Up to life's altar bore his heart. I caught him up — too close to see, Yet seemed to stand apart. Tonight he waked, I held him tight, And watched as I went to and fro The long processions, through the night, Of mothers come and go. Up to life's altar and away, Each bore her gift, and hushed his cries With tired Te Deums. So today God hears our lullabies. Peconic, p-30-l^ 63 LA GITANA NONE of the girls of Ronda have feet as fine as mine, That glimmer and glance through the whirl of the dance as fireflies blaze and shine, Seen in some shadowy rambla outside a gay cafe. None of the girls in Ronda can dance down death, my way. Carmen and fat Conchita can sell themselves for shoes. Black as their souls with the heels of red, such as the Cubans use. They can sell themselves for their stockings, their spider webs of silk. And their feet like their brows are brazen, but mine are white as milk. For mine was a Northern mother my gipsy father found In a brothel in Biscaya. And love in drink he drowned. So I grew up in the gutter,' slinking and wild to be Alone, alive, in the open, sunlit, and flushed and free. Naked in running rivers. So I must dance today Where the eyes of the men are upon my face and flesh like beasts of prey. And the tongues of the tawdry women they tear my life apart 64 LA GITANA 65 And they smear my name with their women's shame as their teeth would tear my heart, As they'd rip the flesh away from my face and the bodice from my breasts. And the wave of life is around me. I am lifted on its crests. I am lifted high on its surges; and the light it lends my eyes Is the strength of noon and sunrise and the splendor of the skies. I am caged in their snarling city, but between its shadowy bars I see the loom of tomorrow and the altar lights of stars. Savage, violent, virgin ; like a trainer in their cage, They snarl at my looks like lashes, these women marred with age. These men that my mind has mastered ; and I rule their restless lives With my feet that flicker through shadows like the bicker- ing light of knives. I dance and they bow before me. Barefoot I turn, I tread On the throbbing hearts of the living and the ashes of the dead. I 56 LA GITANA I dance till I stop, where he stands apart; till I hold his love and hate: Master and man and the bravest heart, sultan and slave and mate. Paris, 5-16-13 ANNUNCIATION ACROSS the air shaft is a window high. Across the sill the shadows slowly creep. Lilting a little childish lullaby, A little maiden lulls a doll to sleep. A little childish form that comes and goes, That bends above its baby, nurses there The warmth of life that opens wide the rose. That wraps its buds against the April air. Behind her walk dead women wondering At the pure rapture in the childish eyes. As bright and glad as the first sight of spring. The first blue rift in winter's leaden skies. Madonnas, saints and sinners, beggars, queens; All the pale past, by pain and passion torn ; Lean close, as closer to her child she leans, Bearing within her heart her babe unborn. S.S. Awa Maru, 12-18-13 67 A WOMAN WHY she married him I don't know. How she sticks to him I can't tell. Second by second and inch by inch she goes on lifting him out of hell. Smiles when you see her. Her lips grow tense like a tired runner that true to form Moves without haste through the swirls of dust that follow the feet of the first of the storm. Once she was prettier than the rose. Just so simple and soft and sweet: Laughed like a brook that sings in the spring. Now she has toiled past her first defeat. Time has taken and hardened her heart to the heart of a woman that dares, that bears, All things still for the love she lost. Now she has done with old visions and prayers. Time has trained her to live and to last, making her patient and sure and still, Thoroughbred, lean and fine: each line is a line of strength. She is all one will Waking and working and holding fast his life, that shivers and shrinks and falls, Blundering blindly from door to door in the city's maze with its millions of walls. 68 A WOMAN 69 Now she nods where she wasted words as he wastes his silver and drains away His soul's solution in glasses tall, where he clings to each clink. Now day by day Her first caresses she wastes no more on the child of her fears where she dreads to see What in his father she worshipped once, and she never looks backward or listens to me. Resolute, silent, day after day she lifts him up as he sags and shrinks. Fighting for breath she goes winning her way. Now no longer of shame she thinks, Now no more of pleasure or pain, than girlish ribbons and dresses outgrown. She is a woman, one heart and brain that God first gave us to mother its own. Dick isn't vicious or wicked or wild; simply weak and worthless as waste. For wiping life's engines. He keeps her clean and keen and shining in breathless haste: Just her big baby to wash and to kiss when his face and his hands are smeared with the street. God Almighty has made her for this, while her heart which is His to the limit shall beat. 70 A WOMAN She was my dream. She has grown beyond dreams and Dick, and herself, and me. She wouldn't drop if they lifted the load. Couldn't be wasted. People see Day after day in her lips and her eyes one of life's leaders and conquerors. Something that toils through tides and skies to carry life on to tomorrow is hers. New York, 6-2 J- 1 4 BEDTIME HE was not willing quite to go, And yet he came and clung to me. His drowsy eyes could barely see: Up the long stairs he stumbled so. And there our pilgrimage we made, And climbing high to heaven, once more I watched his wistful lips adore The God that makes the stars afraid. I stood beside him and I sang As the young planets, choiring, when They first conceived the souls of men. Through all the aisles of heaven rang. He heard me. In his sleep he smiled: And a new moonbeam in the night Crept from the clouds, a prayer in white; Kissed as I kissed, my little child. Portland, Oregon, 1 2-3-1 3. 71 THE OLD MOTHER FROM my body, heart and brain He was born to give me pain. In his making I was made, In his sins my soul is weighed. I lost sleep that he might sleep, Dared not weep lest he should weep. Long I watched him through the night. One small will I called to light : All a lifetime fighting in One small baby's fevered skin. Death I wrestled with and threw : Watched him wake. So dear he grew. He has work to justify Now, and one as near as I ; Work too easy, wife too slight: Once more watching all the night, I grow slowly sure and wise. So he missed his father's eyes. Still his father's spirit lives Somewhere in him. Life forgives. All when he comes back to me Tired and sad and glad to be 72 \ THE OLD MOTHER 73 Just a little child once more, Near me on the nursery floor. Then my hand upon his brow- Holds his heart. And I know now How to suffer for his sake Till his soul in strength shall wake. Pe conic, 8-^-14 HER BIRTHDAY EIGHTEEN already? Still It seems This world of wickedness is good. Still she sees sunrise in her dreams; The mysteries of maidenhood Lie like light shadows on her brow; Her lips are like red rosebuds now. Soon they shall open like her heart. I watch her, wistful, wondering. When time's last petals fall apart Shall she still singing smile at spring? She smiles at me; and shall we fear September, dear, when spring is here? Her eyes have looked on lovely things So long, their light is loveliness. Her thoughts are white ; their tender wings Like flitting butterflies caress All souls that seared by sin and pain Still on the side of light remain. Her voice is beauty, born to be The music clear of love that thrills Through her young pulses. So is she Sister of streams and stars and hills. She is one word that God has made To meet tomorrow unafraid. 74 HER BIRTHDAY 75 While the warm fragrance of her soul Blends with the air I breathe, I know She is one part of one great whole, That sends her sisters like the snow To make this world one moment white ; But some like starlight in the night. PeconiCj y-j-14 EVE I SAW our surgeon and I know. There was white iris in his vase. Today I have begun to grow. I saw my mission in his face. For I was wilful and perverse, A girl as giddy as the rest. And soon life's hunger I shall nurse, And feel his fingers on my breast. I wondered as I walked the streets, Watching where other women stood, In whom this double pulsing beats. The holy word of Motherhood, That stirred in me. And one I saw; Her face was strange and grave and sweet A living letter of God's law. She was my sister in the street. I met my mirror. Suddenly, I saw another standing there — Older than I. And I could see Her brow was drawn with pain and care. Her lips were lovely, and her eyes, Mirrored all wisdom and delight. 76 EVE 77 Her lips were sweet as lullabies. Her face was wonderful and white. Her arms were strong to hold me fast, While tears between my eyelids stole. She kissed me. And I know at last Today my body bears a soul. Peconic, ^-^0-14 ARTS THE LEADER FOUR more than four score bowmen, to wing the shafts of sound My craft has gathered round me. My violins are drowned By the sound of drums and brasses like an army's mightier guns. And now to the highest circles of the crowded house there runs My summons. I seize, I sway them, I lift them high, I hold Two seconds; sound and silence. And each is made of gold. And the beasts that lurk in blackness, and the powers of night draw back. I was your spirit's leader. But little might I lack Of the God that fills my fingers, the truth that I trans- late. I was a force for your breathlessness, and mastership of fate. I have drilled the Devil's dance of death through the halls of huge hotels. I have led the iron drums of war where the roar of battle swells. I was a minnie-singer and music's man at arms, 8i 82 THE LEADER Selling myself for a season to wealth that wastes and harms. So have I gathered my bowmen, captains of five and ten, Haggled and cringed and hoarded to lift my head again. I was the mind that made them. I am the will that calls. Like a keyboard loud I played them. They trembled, hearts and walls Till she came, my white soprano, and music's mouth indeed. And her grace-notes glide and linger and I no longer lead. I and my mercenaries have toiled and earned our truce We have swayed your hearts to silence and justified our use. But her voice evokes the fairies whose fingers set men free From folly and forgetfulness that fetter you and me. I have mastered you and marshalled you. You hung upon my hand. But high above my battlements of sound I see her stand. Like God's own herald proclaiming His terms of peace to all. THE LEADER 83 And I alone am kneeling in the shadow of the wall, For I, mjA birthright shaming, no nearer home may win; While to the very vault of heaven, her spirit enters in. New York, 12-IJ-12 THE RECITAL THEY groped in darkness till thc}' heard the har- monies of wind and seas. They felt the lilt of flying feet. They took the tune of water falls. They knew the notes of birds and all the hungry forest's harsher calls; Till from long terror and delight they learned their music by degrees. From war-drums throbbing through the night, from conches hoarse to Bacchus blown, From clashing brass that Cybele adored, each chord they made their own. Dull nerves time tuned through centuries grew tense; raw voices clearer rang. Then came the masters. Ear and hand and brain con- ceived and caused to be, Till harp and drum were harmonized and harpsichord and spinet rang. They framed their formal scale of sound, they plotted curves of harmony. Made music's mathematics, wrote its formula and codified The truth life told them, note by note, its secrets that in silence hide. They listened to the infinite and heard the Word that comprehends 84 THE RECITAL 85 All wisdom and all ecstasy; and faltering as children speak, Fearing the voice revealed to them, they tried to tell what sound transcends. Today the world that conquers fear and goes beyond where they were weak Has no such singers. Here I sit and sound the scales of life today. And I have power, and I have skill and I have hearing when I play. I have an instrument intense and adequate, with nerves of steel As the new world you live in now; a new projection of the hands That flit like butterflies and fall like cataracts; that make you feel The child's delight, the sea's unrest, the soul of love that understands All sorrows and all mysteries on earth that makes us what we are: The fragrance of the fading rose, the splendor of the falling star. Something intangible I touch, new wireless messages translate. 86 THE RECITAL I see their stories in your eyes, and on your trembling lips detect, The power I seize to sway your souls, to summon them to strive with fate, Till my piano, throbbing, drones a dynamo of intellect. And then I see those trembling hands that to life's limit drew so near, Ten fingers blind stretched out to God to bring one echo to your ear. Los Angeles, ll-iy-ij THE DEAD SCULPTOR T TE might have been a mother. So •*■ -*■ He lived with life. In travail sore He brought to light the love he bore, And paid the debt all living owe. He touched its substance. Tenderly He felt the spirit in the clay And gave it shape. Like hands that sway The keys that sound a symphony, His fingers played with light and shade; Till in some splendid strength of line He made of matter chords divine That quiver ever. Life he weighed, In human hands, as mothers hold Their babies' bodies to the light: As priests before their altar bright Lift up the host. The truth he told, In one great, common mother tongue To all the world in praise and prayer. Men felt their burdens lifted where They found his heart forever young. And still it beats in bronze and stone, And still he smiles in sculptured lips, 87 88 THE DEAD SCULPTOR That whisper what his finger tips Caressed, divined, and made his own. And still his soul in sleepless eyes Looks out at us and lives again: And past their night of prayer and pain Finds one last light where dying dies. Pe conic, 6-IJ-14 THE SECRET I CANNOT paint the gateway to our garden and July. An arch of half trimmed cedar spars, a diamond blue of sky, Between two long green trellises of grapevines. Over all The little rambler roses in their crimson thousands crawl. Ten thousand crimson butterflies upon our arbor lit. The sunbeams kiss their petals and the shadows softly flit Through the gate that leads to gladness where blue lark- spurs bloom and sway. White sweet williams, purple centered, nod their welcome by the way. There are honeysuckle hedges sweet, where yellow lips and white Drink the dew drops, breathing morning back. Their lamps of pure delight All the roses softly lighting on the altar of today Flame aspiring, yield adoring, scent and color caught from clay. • I cannot paint the glory and the gladness. I can show Flakes of color, flecks of sunshine, shadows long, green trees below, 89 90 THE SECRET Where the pansies open eyes beneath small brows that seem to see Straight and clear and everlasting, the secret lost to me. I can only dream of rainbows, dead last year, today re- born; I can only see lost sunsets, all the gates of night and morn. Leaking out stray rays of glory, till I tremble: till one thrill Of all life upon my canvas lies. The rest is dead and still: Till a brooding robin singing, life interprets; and I seize Something of the droning, purring bliss of humming birds and bees; Till two laughing children, calling, clasp their mother: and I know Why the Lord of storms and perils sends His roses here to grow. Peconic, 6-24-14 THE TOUCHSTONE YES, sculpture's hell from start to finish till at last The work shall stand alone; the dream your heart conceived To manhood's stature grown, the thought your brain received, The shape your hands have held, the life you felt, has passed Out of your agonies: until the stone Is cut, the bronze Is cast. You write ; your fountain pen your baton black transcribes, Thought's Instant symphony, that for the few transcends All that we see or feel. You play. Your music rends Sparse heart strings tuned to It and ceases. All the tribes Of earth that heard you not, shall still to death resign their sordid bribes. You paint; your magic wand, your screen of light may throw New luster glad on life, new shadows of the light That lives In every man, whose dreams you daub with night. You paint upon one plane. You trick us, and we know Most of all arts that fall on earth, to earth the darkest debt you owe. 91 92 THE TOUCHSTONE Yet man may live through paint, where some strong soul is found To vitalize its lure; as man through words may live, Through sounds, life's echoes faint. But we its substance give. You make your medium slight, elusive. Truth profound You mirror or betray. But we who try to shape life in the round. Our burden heavier is who deal with weightier things, With matter dull, inert, with cold and clogging clay. Life in the rough we shape, its husks we shred away: Its essence bring to light; till every flaw that clings Falls from our hands, that hold at last the truth that lives in stone that sings. No soundingboard it needs, no roof, no study walls, From every angle seen, it stands in square and street. Each line as fine and clean as truth made fit to meet All ; critic ; child ; each life that halts, that hopes, that crawls, To touch today's white monument of will that still to- morrow calls. Peconic, y-12—14 THE SICK EDITOR ONCE I was young and I trusted time, and my star rode far and high. And art was life, and an editor was God's own ardent eye. Now, day by day, each pleasant lie, each dearest dream must die. Yesterday noon I was watching a gang of Dagoes at the pier Where the city's waste is winnowed out. A lump of coal lay here. Maybe a diamond lurked in this endless screen of sweep- ings drear. Acres of wasted paper pass. My hook goes out to seize Some ragged smear of blood and mud, some scrap of aim- less ease, Like a paper rose that a child has made. And you read such rags as these. And the mills of God's imfamies grind on. And copy ceaseless flows. In farms and sweatshops grinding on, each tired typewriter goes. And I see their frayed processionals of faithless verse and prose. 93 94 THE SICK EDITOR God that has given us life to live and His w^ords of life to say, God that our hearts so much forgive: did His heart fore- see this day, When He laid His kiss on the lips of Eve and He moulded Eden's clay? And His little children of letters come, clever and still and shy. Some with a poet's prescience, some with want in each wide eye. And the tender lips grow tired and numb, and the dearest dreams must die. Each is a bread line Edith says. And Edith's eyes see all. And I measure them out my alms of time. And day by day they crawl With their little shivering loves and hates through a hole in the office wall. And the littlest, cleverest children of all that the wear>' souls of men Play with because they pass the time: they cash their checks, and then Some tired typewriter gets to work and wastes God's words again. THE SICK EDITOR 95 Once the morning stars together sang and life was fair and free, Fine as each line in Edith's hair when her stare turns back to me. For we are the slaves of swift success, and its sweepings, I and she. And summer time is weeks away, and the mountains dim and far. And we all are heaps of crumbling clay. God's searchers gray we are Who toil to find one gem today, tonight to see one star. Parisj 4-8-14 ART IN THE SLUMS BLINDLY you snatched at surfaces like children, Painted your prostitutes of money kings: There where you smeared life's face with rouge and powder. Lying, you trick today with trivial things. Art is an angel. You have bound her wings. Art is the heart's long hunger for enduring. Art is the restless will that wrestles past Hunger and pain and loneliness in silence. Art is the faith that feasts where flesh must fast. Art is the soul that lives in strength at last: Keen as a surgeon's scalpel, clean, unswerving. Seeking the truth that meets today's demands; Cleaving all surface lures, to seize the secret: Art is the brain that sees and understands. Art is the loving touch of tender hands. You have not known her. You have smeared like chil- dren, Colors of greed, and sordid haste and shame; Colors that shriek for crowds upon the pavement; Pictures life tramples underfoot. Your fame Breaks like a bubble who blaspheme her name. Art is a child. Its artist, like a mother, Suffers all things to bring this life to birth; 96 ART IN THE SLUMS 97 Nurses it, clasps It, loves it for a life time; Grows with it slowly, making sorrow mirth When art's long patience shall possess the earth. Art is the service you have scorned, who blindly Snatched her least gifts. Her temple stands obscure, Far from the eyes of riches. All who sorrow See her in truth that stands while days endure. Art is God's gospel painted for the poor. Peconicj 6—2g—i^ THE CURATOR MEMPHIS this mirror made immortal. I like to think of the smooth brown faces; A dancer's smile like the Nile in sunlight, a priest like the heads on his mummy cases ; Placid and wise, unchanging, watching the life that comes and the life that goes, In little ripples that lapse forever the w^ay that his smooth brown river flows, Life that rippled my dancer's lips when she bent from this bronze till she kissed a rose. And her sister priestesses of Isis some old Egyptian lover painted, Tripping along by the Nile to the temple, like these Greek girls by grief untainted, In a fragment white of a frieze from Corinth, with their youth that the years can never kill. And we worshipped life till we made Madonnas. And we painted passions pure that thrill, Stirred by the growth of the god within them. I can see them smile in the shadow still. Joy was always beautiful. Slowly beauty in sorrow we learned to render. Wistful lips with their pain prophetic making relentless truth more tender. 98 THE CURATOR 99 Then came Rembrandt and beauty in ruins found in the beggar, in faces old Warped by the storms of the barren seasons. Today you tell me that art is cold, Hearing no voice, seeing no visions; and art draws near to her age of gold. Millions of years have mixed her pigments, savage dyes for her face preparing. Fear gave color. The shaman's symbols imaged a night full of fiends unsparing. Rough brown idols, blackened by bloodshed slowly shaped to the gods of Greece, White in the sun for one hour. And never has art yet won for her soul release. Art is a pilgrimage that ceases, only when life on this earth shall cease. Now through these halls I can see them marching, pio- neers of her years unreckoned, Monks with their manuscripts illumined, masters old of one human second. Now we have made a new world in a minute, millionfold power remultiplied. You of 5^our little faith who are fretful, look for your art your heart inside. loo THE CURATOR Art Is the j^ounger sister of science. Just so long shall her secrets hide. Science is patience, art is her sister. Now we are testing her spectrum slowly. Common things show in rarer colors, shed new light over streets unholy. And the world is newly rich. It is dazzled by a myriad sudden and shifting goals. And the blindest paint the harlots of millions, advertize art that must take its tolls From surfeit and waste, while it toils with the toilers: till it sees, till it feels, till it fills men's souls. San Francisco, ii-jo-13 PICTURES FOR MEN I MUST paint pictures of men in a world of men that toil, Men on bent masts at sea in the lee of the drip of oil, Lashed to a sea anchor; men in a ship in the grip of the frozen floes. Blasting the ice into rainbowed hail: men where the grail in a stoke hole glows: Men in full dories laboring homeward into the night through the gray water rows. Men in the mines that drill until June swings round to June: Stabbing the guts of earth with their bomb tipped steel harpoon : Lashed by the fringe of a blast, falling where fire damp spreads : Men that fall under our feet; men that drive over our heads ; Tracking the trail of the reeking rail and racing the storms through the gray watersheds. Men in long cuts and fills in the forests; men in the mist, Swinging wet girders home while the rusting cables twist, Locking the wards of the bridge; men whose new cities rise lOI I02 PICTURES FOR MEN Laying steel floor upon floor like bricks to bind the skies. Men that the quicksands have caged in the pit, where the last deep foundation its vortex defies. Men at new motors of life, white as they skid through night: Men on tall traveling cranes: in the subway's shuttles of light, Men in dim submarines: men in a mob in the street Cleaving the crowds with their clashing gongs: men on the roofs, that meet Dragging their hose over crashing walls, where the granite flows down the billows of heat. Men that dissect the stars, divorce the atoms, where Plague in the test tube boils, men whose clear thought is prayer; Men with the surgeon's knife cutting old sins away From the rotting limbs of life, till they stand to serve today. I must paint pictures of men, of their hands, till my hands and pictures together shall pray. Too long we have learned to play with art and life's laces and silk, Meddled with women's skins and muddled with roses and milk : PICTURES FOR MEN 103 And the world demands today a word of life at our hands. And we may not turn away longer from life's demands. I shall paint pictures of masters that say how the soul of the street in its mastery stands. PeconiCj 8-10-14 TRUTH ALL the rest shall fall away, Flake and fade. But this alone Stands tomorrow and today Like God's statutes strong in stone. Athens carved them slowly so, Florence flamed in bronze that lives; Gave their gods. The rest shall go. Time that nothing false forgives, Tests your strength and sleight of hand, Racks your heart and rends your brain. Till your soul can understand All things perfect born of pain. Every slight and sordid lie. Each black treason to the light, Every lesser lust shall die : Till your will glows still and white. Envy, rancor, fear and pride, Praise that lures, and blame that brands, Failure faced and greed denied Fuse life's essence to your hands. Then beneath your canvas glows, Through your bronze and marble thrills 104 TRUTH 105 Color fairer than the rose, Strength that shall outlast the hills. Through your words a wisdom sings, That the world's last need demands: Until time your message brings To life's service sure that stands. Peconic, 8-1-14 REGIONAL LITTLE BRIDES OF MARY LIKE the color of a dewdrop in the morning of the year, Like a bluebird heard in April on a note that's far and near, Like the blossoms white that catch the light where serried cherry trees Lift their snowdrifts up the hillside, petals trembling on the breeze: They begin to bud and blossom in the mother's month of May, With their tyts of unwise angels, childish voices grave and gay: With their little childish footsteps, down the highways, through the streets Everywhere that France, that Paris their white litany repeats : Childish voices put their questions, whisper words they never know, Where in Paris, where in peril, through perdition must we go? Who of us shall find perfection in the pallid paths of peace ? Who in grime, and who in slime and bloodshed earn red life's release? 109 no LITTLE BRIDES OF MARY Who of us shall sin and stronger grow, so serve the Lord of all, Life the Moloch, life the maker of His stars and servants small ; Life the master of our armies and the children's last crusade ; Little petals white of worship, born today to fall and fade. They are gone. The streets of Paris strike their strange and strident notes. Through their symphony of living something sacred sings and floats; Something that one sees at sunset, through the shadows of a shrine. In each small white altar light of love that dying makes divine. Paris, 5-20-1^ THE HOST IN THE HHLS YOU live in the shaded valleys; you die on the treeless plains : And blind go down to darkness. Your dust alone re- mains. You toil in the restless city. You choke in its stagnant smoke, Though once to the light in a woman's eyes your strug- gling spirit woke: Mount to the mounts of vision with a heart that hopes and thrills, Though your breath shall fail as you take the trail to the highway of the hills : To these old Italian cities that a wiser world has made, Where war and love w^ere the workers, and art was the bride of trade, And the lust of the brute was bondsman and master day and night, Of Faith that found its God in flesh and bound each cross crowned height With a chain of stone and story, where vine and olive climb Up through the time scarred summits, to blue skies un- touched by time. Cortona's Citadel defies the years. Assisi here With Francis, God's good prodigal, the saints in heaven revere. Ill 112 THE HOST IN THE HILLS Perugia rears her ramparts proud, her griffin's nest of stone. FoHgno crests her holy height. Her houses gray have grown Like lichens from the living rock. And like one starless sea, Wave after wave the Apennines are wonderful and free. Here is a world of wonder: no less where you shall go Through shaded lanes and court yards close, and love and labor know. Where dead Etruscan husbandmen their terraced gardens piled ; Where Perugino taught his trade and Raphael toiled and smiled ; And goats that crop the hedges rear high beside the way: And young Admetus drives them forth from a world too old to play. Toil upon ceaseless toiling these walls of giants laid, And stone on stone of truth they squared and set whose hands have made Rampart and tower, and tomb and shrine. There priests and choirsters led In long processionals the host; but they who knelt and bled THE HOST IN THE HILLS 113 To make their masonry the throne of God unknown on high; Look where they left bare steps of stone to altars in the sky. Perugia, 6-2 1- 1 J KARMA THROUGH the dying brazen booming of the throb- bing temple bells, Through the streets of old Kyoto, to the hearts of liv- ing men. Runs a thinner note that waves, quavers, rises, sinks and swells ; Till the drifting dust is shifting, dancing to a samisen. They were lovers in the springtime. They were happy for a night. For a day they lived like lovebirds born of light, of Buddha s smile. Walking where the cherry blossoms hid the world with walls of white. And the blossoms, falling, calling, whispered warnings all the while. " O the agonies of lovers! He was poor and she a slave. Youngest in the Yoshiwara. All their years of youth we knew. Made one sword our key to midnight, lay together in the grave. Karma called us through the ages till we lived at last in you. '' O the agonies of lovers!'' Though the singer's smile is old, 114 KARMA 115 Lustreless her lips, and sightless eyes that long have looked at pain, Through her voice her heart revealing, like a slender wire of gold, Steals a thrill of vital feeling calling souls to life again. Through the faces gray and dying, through the old Kyoto streets, Runs a trembling of old heart strings to her fingers worn and sure. Of a million million lovers, each his love in April meets On the lips of girls around her, wistful, fair, and warm and pure. Kyoto, 12-SI-13 BISKRA GOD'S gray earth as God first made it, Biskra brings to you and me. Round about the green oasis like a frozen, dusty sea. Hills and dunes surge on and halt. Here the French a desert found, Went to work and built a railroad. Now the wheels go rolling round. Down to Biskra from the mountains, down two slender strands of steel Where the master of tomorrow strikes a note the nomads feel. All the wires beside the rails that thrill with preludes strange and new. Of the song today is singing ; sound its tensions stern and true ; Stir the desert. Desolation wakes and living water flows Out of earth in wells artesian till the grayness greener grows. Muddy irrigation ditches, ripples dull that leap and run, Spell the motives of tomorrow's larger life beneath the sun. Biskra stirs, and life electric through her tents in tumult thrills. Here the desert; there the sunlight feels the clash of mas- ter wills, ii6 BISKRA 117 Stony hills where hell's huge seething cauldron fought to overflow ; Sandy dunes for aeons drifting; now a stronger master know. Man growls more. And men who blindly yesterday the line surveyed Human brutes who bore its sleepers; God's own path to glory made. Yesterday they scaled their levels, yesterday through tun- nels toiled, Starved and suffered on the desert, saw their starkest ef- forts foiled ; Yesterday they won to water; dying slaked our thirst. And we Down to Biskra, o'er the mountains bring unrest that stirs the sea; Bring the city, bring the spirit of its struggles, of its sins; Life that creeps and life that soaring, still to wider wor- ship wins. Biskra bows before its altars. Idle tourists stare and pass, And the God unknown that made them sees each spread- ing growth of grass. Sees new gardens; smiles; and slowly suns from utmost midnight draws. ii8 BISKRA Sends His light to man that slowl)^ masters time's eternal laws. Biskra smiles, and Biskra burns; and Biskra's arc-lights in the sand Mark the trail where man goes marching till his soul shall understand. Algiers, 3-^9-H COVENT GARDEN GRAY old Covent Garden bears its blossoms fair of song, Bears its flowers in murky airs. They blossom all day long, Free to all who chance to see. Here are bought and sold Little living miracles of sunlight scented gold. Suns and stars and galaxies, j'^ours to have and hold. Incense of the dews and dawn drawn for many a mile, Come in slow procession while the gutter children smile. Beauty past the windows blind the plodding carters bring, Radiance of the rainbows mixed with all the airs of spring, London's ancient offering to life, her lord and king. English pink primroses that a drunken hag has pressed Close against her mask of pain to gain a moment's rest ; Paler stars that shine where death his dirges slow recites, Roses red that women wear through golden days and nights. Little laughing marigolds and violets, shy delights. All are in the traffic that our motor marches through. Hooting through their fragrance on our way to Water- loo. We have watched the magic of the moment that is May, 119 I20 COVENT GARDEN We have heard our morning mass; where London, grim and gray Makes its sweetest offering to joy that dies today. S.S. St. Paul 5-4-14 THE SALESMAN YESTERDAY as I was waiting by the gate at Water- loo, Came a porter with his load of trunks and slowly trucked them through. And some were labelled Zanzibar, some Delagoa Bay, With a cricket bag high on the top, where the English work and play Five thousand miles away from home as their fathers used to do. And I wondered as I watched him if that porter ever thought How he thrust an empire onward with the baggage that he brought From that little northern island, that from pole to south- ern pole Thrusts its outposts through the oceans, while the years like oceans roll Around its crumbling fringes, till its final war is fought. And I w^ondered if he pondered on new strikes for cent per cent, On the rising cost of living and the higher cost of rent, If no gleam of sudden insight made his service seem di- vine, If he saw he sent new pioneers on to fill the firing line Of England on its outposts in God's darkest continent. 121 122 THE SALESMAN I suppose he went on walking with no eye to look within On some book beyond the Bible that should make new worlds begin In a Boer's benighted brain, and there perhaps he laid his hands On God's messages of music that should bring divine commands To some Kaffir in the desert with a soul to lose or win. Possibly he saw the pictures of a painter's palette there, Or a surgeon's case of scalpels, bits of things that babies wear. Fashioned by today's Madonnas with the prayers that make divine Daily sacraments of living. So he trucked them down the line, With his stolid stride and shoulders, shoulders big and bowed and square. Life today is mostly luggage. I sell motors for my pains. And I keep the traffic moving over mountains, over plains. My new models over oceans I go trucking ; and I see Men and women marching in them, God's new models that shall be Of tomorrow I am making while I wait for steamer trains. S,S. St. Paul 5-5-14 NATURE AND THE PIT SATURDAY afternoon in June, I warm the country- side. I paint the hills with purple. My arms I open wide. Saturday afternoon in June the playhouse and the halls Where the housetops hide the vistas, stifle my clearest calls. And the little, pitiful people, single and double line. Shuffle and crawl along the wall. Without a world di- vine Waits on the Surrey reaches, in Kentish woods and lanes. And little people huddle here, and hide from fear and pains. A beggar whines along the line. A sick girl casts away Into his hat the coppers of her heart's last holiday. They form them up in fours at last. They pass the wicket through. London's last ragged regiment in tawdry dress review. Kismet! The curtain rises. The beggar whines and prays Till Allah's will prepares for him at last his day of days. A harlot's lips are loosed in smiles as Hadji the cynic speaks. And love has kindled rosy lights on a woman's wasted cheeks. He grasps at gold and women. He fights his foes to kill. 123 124 NATURE AND THE PIT Adventure wakes in eyes malign, and restless hands are still. Kismet! The curtain falls as Allah's caliph's will is told, The beggar banished. Hearts that flamed grow dull and cold and old. And little various vices and sins in sordid shapes Wait at the curb and watch for them. And men who once were apes Have lost their hour of wonder as I my hour have lost. You have made of me a harlot. Today you pay the cost. You make my children cruel and tame, and trite and vile. And out in the open spaces, I live and learn to smile. You make my vagrants vermin, and I return their taints To the voices of your virgins and the visions of your saints. You hunt me from the open and I steal and double past The shadows black that shroud the pit to save you at the last. London, 4-20— 14 APRIL IN THE LUXEMBOURG EARTH that slept is waking, stirring, parting veils of April rain, Thrusting back the clouds. And Paris feels her fresh- ness green again. Winds of March that hushed, have whispered. Smiling ripples idly stir Through the blue where birds are calling, falling. Day's first worshipper Calls the restless soul of Paris up to life and light with her. God w^ho made His earth a garden, made them man and woman there, Made the sky to be His shadow, made His flowers of April fair, Made the trees to be His temples, made the birds His heart to sing. Made His love to shape the Issues of each least and living thing, Made His Paris for His pleasure, in His smile which is the spring. Paris passes from the shadows. Through her streets of greed and shame Seeks His garden in the open, sees each tulip's torch of flame, 125 126 APRIL IN THE LUXEMBOURG Goes to greet the sun her lover like the wind. With eye- lids wet Leaning on her latest lover, every little midinette Smiles and hoards one hour of hope that all her life shall not forget : Wakes by bird song from her garret, steals through shad- ows to today, Where the w^inds with waving fountains from their cen- sers scatter spray; Where the lilacs lift her eyelids, till the dawn has drawn her lips. All things wonderful that women treasure up till love's eclipse, Lift her till all life lies trembling at her trembling finger tips. In the shadows he is waiting, small and furtive, mean and old. But his heart mounts up to meet her, there to share her hour of gold. There she holds her Host to Heaven. For one hour there glorified She is Eve in God's own garden, she whose son for sin- ners died; Till the iron wheels of Paris grind to dust the day out- side. Paris, 4-2^-14 SOLDIERS OF LIFE I HAVE finished my regular stint at last, I have written my thousand words today, Ranged my last regiment raw in ranks, drilled them and driven them down their way. Sent them to reinforce the rest till my book is an army made complete. And sudden, the sound of a bugle blast peals through the rush of this Paris street. Thrilling the length of the boulevard, twenty-four trum- pets of brass begin, Where the houses stand in two ranks on guard, to blare through the traffic, their way to win. Cleaving the press like the point of a lance, through a mist that melts, through a drizzle of rain. Soldiers of France into light advance, and the sun leaps out into sight again. Nearer and nearer the columns come, longer and longer stretches the line. Faster and faster beat the drums, the red legs twinkle, the bayonets shine, And Paris wakes out of her mid-day trance, her pulses quicken, her eyeballs gleam, And she halts and huzzas for her soldiers of France, and a song in steel, and a scarlet dream. 12/ 128 SOLDIERS OF LIFE Soldiers of France, you are mine today, and I stand at my window and heart and hand. Crippled and halt, hidden away, leap up at the light of your fatherland. At the red in her blood, at the lilt in her voice, at the song of freedom for all she sings. Soldiers of France, march on, rejoice till they fester and fall, all their pestilent kings. Soldiers of France on the last frontiers of life and freedom through jungles dark, You are pioneers, and you blaze the way for us who halt in our homes and mark The sweat you shed, and the blood that's red, and the dead and dying that thread your trails. Blood of the legions Napoleon led, that Caesar sum- moned, France never fails. Battered and bloody she sinks to her knees, till with one hand on her mother earth. Splendid and sure through the smoke she sees beyond the battle, new freedom's battle. We who are waging our war with words, on faith and freedom's final frontiers. We are your brothers, her spirit's heirs; for us a vision, a voice appears. SOLDIERS OF LIFE 129 Jehanne, the saint and the soldier maid, and the soul of France and her soldiers still, Battered and bleeding and unafraid, she lives in Paris our hearts to thrill. Still in the sunset her spirit stands on its pyre of fire, on the Martyr's hill. Soldiers of France, though we die alone, while we halt by the side of your Mount Parnasse, While we read the leaves of your book of stone, till in the shadows all passions pa^s. We may win to the wonder round the throne, to her walls of onyx, her towers of glass. Paris, ^-10- 1 J EMIGRANTS 'IXT'HITECHAPEL courts were killing us where fog ' ' and smoke choke children's breath. The Argentine had stripped our farms. Our England slowly starved to death. A letter came from Edm.onton. We saw a poster In the Strand ; Like pavement pictures crude, of chalk, we planned our people's Promised Land. When debts and drink had dragged us down to Surrey docks where drop lights shine Through glades of steel, they stripped away our sickest while we stood in line. One judgment day was done with. So your transport took us down your stream; Your raw recruits of life, to go where snow peaks glow, where rapids gleam, Past Greenwich, Sheerness, out to sea we steamed. We left the Foreland light. We lost the Lizard. Suddenly to England gone we said goodnight. And winds and waves were shaping us to stand or fall in England's fight. From fog, from steerage slime we came. One sunset's flames lit Newfoundland, 130 EMIGRANTS 131 Our babes, our women, open-eyed saw land draw near on either hand, They fed us through their mill again at Montreal. We caught the cars. And fast and faster rolled away to where the mountains meet the stars. They spilled us o'er the prairie floor at sidings lone, Saskatchewan Took toll of us. Alberta more. But still our strongest hearts held on, Till our last truck had topped the grade. We clanking faster forth to sea Like batteries hurled down to battle, found new frontiers of destiny. The mountain's province and the coast had called us to their firing line. All England and the White Man's host to reinforce. Where yonder pine Towers two hundred feet above the pass, our viking chil- dren play Clear eyed, surefooted, strong of hand, to save your slaves of yesterday. Your ulcer cities in the east that eat the white man's strength away. 132 EMIGRANTS Our fathers held our Northland hills and woods, and ruled her restless sea. And South, and West and East they went and carved your charts whose hearts were free, Numidia sacked, Byzantium and Asia scourged. Our sons today Before the yellow legions come with long ships westward shall away. Till in the final war of all, down from the pole, around the world, flying like eagles to the feast, Shades of old Vikings sentries call our Northland squad- rons sunset hurled, their airship arrows aiming east. S.S, Scotian, ^-2^-1 3 THE OPEN QUESTION THE OPEN QUESTION WHEN I am dead and gone, sweetheart, this restless vrorld shall be A little darker, emptier, more drear, a little space; Till life that gave you grace to love shall teach your eyes to see A little more, a moment dear, before they fill your place. And if I knew the end of all, the hour my light went out; Tomorrow or tonight maybe — you wonder what I'd do; And should I march alone to death and meet him with a shout ; Or should I shudder here at home and creep and cling to you? You could not love a coward, dear, if war were round our walls. And war is ever round the world, and all God's soldiers go Up to the last grim firing line, and each in order falls. I could not love your life alone, nor mine, to lose it so. Tonight may be the end of all. And after, no one knows. I cannot hide my candle end and hoard for us alone. When souls are sinking in the storm, from every gust that blows The God in me that must attain, this talent still my own. 135 136 THE OPEN QUESTION And if the end is near or far, and if we live or die Beyond the blackness, matters not so long as in your sight I have stood up unterrified; and learned to testify To all the million flames of God that mount to meet the night. New York, ii-ig-12 SURVIVAL LIFE'S procession, starting, struggling, whence and how and why and where ; Out of sea ooze, out of ether, out of night, that stair by stair. Climbs to light; that suddenly is lost in darkness and despair: Those we love that out of shadows, from the blackness of the womb, From the mists of distance drifting, limned with light against the gloom, Grow so near and warm and dear, until the midnight makes their tomb: All the march of men that started in slow atoms from the sea, Fast and faster strives today to disappear eternally ; To its sea cliff sweeps. And then like all those others must we be? All the march of man, the millions shouldered nearer to the pit, Selling life for threadbare hours of toil and slumber, slow, unfit. Starving, sick, blind, shuddering, to the black tide of night submit. 137 138 SURVIVAL At that sea cliff's edge the strong, the shrewd, the brave, the tried, the true; All that urged our life along, the souls that held their stars in view; All that met life with a song and smiled at death, must vanish too. But the multitudes are building, hour b)^ hour and year by year. Piers, approaches, to the pit, the ford, the strait. They disappear. So the corals conquered ocean ; so men bring new manhood near. Underground and under ocean, under air and under soul. Men are toiling, building, making piers and stairs. Each human mole Caged in caissons, drives his tunnel towards the spirit's path and goal. Men are toiling, men are making piers and bridges, mo- tors, wings. Airships soar and lift our eyes and hearts to dream diviner things. Lonely scouts of science lead us toward the truth tomorrow- brings. SURVIVAL 139 Here a surgeon, here a chemist, scales and holds his moun- tain height; Reaches out and lifts the race another inch from death and night: Dies and goes to scale his snow peaks, stars and mountain tops of light. Others delving deeper still in souls of men life's essence see. Wireless messages of love they code, till immortality Is made a motor state of mind and the first function of the free. New York, 6-1-12 HEART OF FIRE WE made a fire place In the night, A house of life to keep us warm. We made a home to hold our light Through hours of darkness, cold and storm. And there before our hearth we sit. And visions there and dreams of gold We share, while sparks like seconds flit, And hour by hour our youth grows cold. So hold me close and closer here ; While like two faggots, one clear flame Our moment makes immortal, dear ; And radiant; (For this cause we came, Out of the atoms where the stars Are sparks that fade and night is long.) And listen! till in fiery bars A fallen forest leaps to song. Its golden lilt and lullaby Is like your happy heart, that clings To glories gleaned in days gone by. And fancies from forgotten springs: A fallen forest of the years. We heap its embers here tonight 140 HEART OF FIRE 141 Till in the heart of fire appears All loveliness that lives in light. It leaps, it lures, it wreathes your lips With spirit kisses, till your eyes Are fires that laugh at love's eclipse, — And flaming swords of Paradise. — Till slowly from my fingers slips A loveliness that never dies. Pe conic, 4-21-ij THE LAST VISTA OVER the hills the vista lay Unexplored, till the rain today Woke in me sombre and savage unrest ; Till over the crest of the hill I pressed. Camps of my dreams w^here dawn was red On a world of wonder's watershed, All were ended. The world grew dim In a valley gray and a daylight grim. Life is a limbo of lies, I thought. Where the bravest vision is brought to naught And we follow its vistas vague, in vain, Into midnight's mist and the restless rain. And the years they trick us ; and one by one They steal our dreams till the last is done. So I doubted. But soon, rny dear, Your hands on my eyelids lay warm and near. " Follow me forward and fast," you cried, "And look when I let you." Open eyed I saw your lips and the laughter there, And a star like a gem that graced your hair: That a hand in the night had suddenly set Barely above you. Men forget 142 THE LAST OF VISTA 143 The rain of the stars where night and day We and our world are whirled away; And the playmate tender and tried and true; Death and your lover, who comes to you, Leads you a little, and lets you see The best of your dreams that is yet to be. New York, 12-12-12 SANCTUARY TO her empty house today Like a gray deserted shrine, From Broadway I turn away To my spirit's bread and wine. Here Boldini painted her When the century began: Felt one honest impulse stir ; For one hour was more than man. Mother, he came close to you, Caught the truth your eyes conceived, On your lips its summons knew, For one hour in life believed. I have sinned to snatch success, And my heart is hard and old. All my millions make me less. All my wisdom makes me cold. I shall toil until the end. One by one, where none can know. Wife and work, and faith and friend Last of all your love shall go. Darkness ends our dying eyes. In my weakness here I cleave 144 SANCTUARY 145 To the old eternal lies. For one hour I would believe : Where life lauds her king of kings; There your spirit on her knees, Whispers still eternal things; Out of eyes immortal sees. Port Said, 2-19-14 MARKING TIME LIFE, my lad, is one long wait, after another. Soon or late You'll run up against this rock, or a slimier, slower shock. Mud or sand that clogs the Road. If you're wise you'll shift your load. Poetize, philosophize. One each weary sinew tries ; Armor, motor, grit or brain. One sees brother souls in pain. Fallen from life's firing-line; tells himself, "This chance is mine ; From my task this tithe to take; in another's eyes to wake Faith reborn and manhood stark, mightier than the shore- less dark." One at stragglers swears; or sings; cowards back to tri- umph brings. Life, my dear, is dark with pain. Light casts shadow. Heart and brain, Flesh and soul through travail pangs win their own. Your city clangs, God's grim anvil. Hammers beat, to the tune that end- less feet Since Creation's dawn began to repeat, the March of Man; 146 MARKING TIME 147 Lilting to the pulse of life. Honor's pilgrims, Love and Strife, Lead our leaders. Here we stay, while they wrestle by the way. Some shall stray. Life's soldier halts. Though he swears at some one's faults, From his ranks he never breaks till the Word the column shakes. Or a bullet brings release. Life is war. The paths of peace Lead through pleasant places till some one breaks the truce. And still Through the love outlasting joy, babes are born and girl and boy God's last broken ranks renew. And the black battalions too Night by night their slaves recruit. Life's a fight, or lust and loot. Life's a wave that comes and goes. Life's a wind that lulls and blows. Life's breath, a laugh, a sigh. Life's a journey till we die; Days our mile posts, white or gray; nights their shadows. Now, today, 148 MARKING TIME Life's an endless mountain climb. Though you've halted, marking time ; Lovelier vistas one by one, larger light from sun to sun, Older soldiers w^in for you. Mist and murk obscured your view. Strangling wreaths of battle smoke. That was nothing. Then you woke. Death was done. For life's a fight, on forever up to Light. New York, 4-22-12 THE SOUL HUNTER WE sought life between the suns and ranging far through starless night, Out of chaos swarmed to form, and out of blindness groped to sight. We went seeking through the ages. Wasting aeons wore away One by one the husks that hid the heat that warmed our wasting clay; Till man, naked, from his caves came creeping to the light of day. Life through travail pangs of planets, bore his body, made it strong; Out of weakness wrought his wisdom. Glacial pressure hard and long Held him close to lava fires until his brain blazed forth in light; Till red fear had forced him forth to war with cold and storm and night; Fears that filled his eyes, his ears, and forced his shaking hands to fight. He made gods of fear and shadows; gods unsparing and unknown ; Gods of greed and lust and hatred; gods with hearts and hands of stone; 149 I50 THE SOUL HUNTER Gods of all that crushed and scourged and gnawed without him and within; Gods of sickness, gods of sorrow, gods of darkness breed- ing sin; Gods of life that thrust him forth to light, a larger life to win. Gods of tenderness, that failed him; gods of hope that heard his prayer ; Gods of pity that betrayed him; gods of love that let despair Leave its world for lost, and shrinking in the night hold one sick soul, As a mother holds one child, worth all the world. And while he stole For a slave's slow spirit strength ; all men w^ere marching to their goal. Miser souls one altar candle watched in fear; and sud- denly Life that lends the suns to space and sends new light to eyes that see. Lifted up the mind of man to stars unborn he certifies ; Set men sounding life's last depth ; and taught our surgeons to devise Scalpels new that death's dark heart dissect, till truth is torn from lies. THE SOUL HUNTER 151 Once man sought his soul in darkness as a babe is born in pain. Now man's manhood leaps to light like search lights stab- bing storm and rain ; Reaching out to wider service ; toiling on eternity ; Dying, giving something living, larger life more fit to be ; To one soul of all the world, that cell by cell from hell goes free. New York, y-ii-14 TOMORROW I WOKE from dreams of him today. I heard Beyond these four close cage-like walls, the sum- mons of a bird Into the garden's fragrance and the breath before the dawn. Then from the womb of morning and the doors of death withdrawn, Another life, another light, leapt forth to quicken the earth and sky; Another April day was born too wonderful, too fair to die. " David is dead," they told me yesterday. At twilight I looked out at death. And these dim hillsides gray Where once we walked in splendor were like ashes of the earth. Today he lives in me once more. The spring, the sun- light's birth Are nature's tongues to tell me that his life could not be lost. And then the birds began to come. How^ many leagues of air they crossed, How many miles of land and seas their tireless questing carried here, Back to our garden's apple trees to nest and breed another year! S2 TOMORROW 153 David has gone but only gone before. Our souls are birds of passage that must fly forever more Across the weary seas of space from star to farther star. And shall w^e not come back again to where our gardens are, Our homes, our children's children, in this little nest of earth In our corner of God's garden, where the planets leap to birth Like His flowers of flame forever; and where the meteors all Fade like petals of perfection through the spirit's spring and fall? Had he only left me children — but the children of his dreams I shall bear and rear and care for ; till our home, our garden seems Just a tryst of life, of spirit memories that never die; Birds of passage year by year that April's radiance glorify. Whether comes a happier lover, larger life to me to give; Or at heart a widow ever, I in other children live. All he was and willed, undying, I shall cherish till I see Eyes and lips that laughing, crying, David's love bring back to me. S.S^ Friedrich der Grosse, g-4-12 PRACTICAL PEOPLE YOU have lost beauty and delight and worlds of won- der wild and real. You have forgotten everything the child and savage see and feel. You wrap your thoughts in threadbare words. The blur- ring types of your machine Your feelings faint in faded patterns print, your starless nights between. For truth eternal, naked, new as sunrise or a baby's smile, Your hearts too hard to tremble to, hide in some dusty letter file. Your minds are mirrors of the streets, your eyes in ledgers lost, survey. Like columns to be added through, year after year, each sordid day. Your feet in coffins black have died to the fresh touch of turf and dew. Your hands that here typewriters plied too long, lose hold of life. To you Joy that with jewels threads each hour, that makes a miracle supreme Of every weed and wayside flower, is dead as yesterday's dead dream. 154 PRACTICAL PEOPLE 155 When comes a voice to vitalize blood that o'er mountains used to run? What vision serves to quicken eyes that saw huge seas that drowned the sun? What message stirs the ears that heard the sea peaks splintered, undismayed ? What warmth shall light the embers cold that into silence fall and fade? You shun the sunlight who the air of heaven in houses dark defile, You have forgotten gladness there; to run, to wrestle, shout and smile. Adventure clamors at your gates. You shut her out where comfort crawls. You hump your back above your books. You waste your lives in rotting walls. For you have made of printer's ink a serpent in whose paper coils Your souls are crushed. You hide away the wealth that stifles, wastes, and spoils. All heaven and earth you use today to drown yourselves in dollar bills. When will you ever stop to play with morning marching up the hills? 156 PRACTICAL PEOPLE When will your bloodless spirits guess the wonder in one grain of sand, One spark of fire; the tenderness in one girl's smile, one child's warm hand; The rapture in one robin's song, one rose, one moonrise after rain? You who to blackness here belong, can souls like yours be born again? Peconic, N. Y., ^-22-14 TOY LAND THERE'S a little Jew cash girl that comes and stares At my toys for little near-millionaires, Motor cars, battleships, aeroplanes, That you wind with a key, every day that it rains. When she looks at the dolls it's like saying your prayers. Mimi from Paris the star of the show Squeaks out her name when one squeezes her, so. Now if I was one of that high brow bunch Of better than thou dames, I've got a hunch I'd have bought her for Becky a long time ago. I've got a snap shot. Say, wouldn't she be Fuller of joy than a bird on a tree? Maybe the tips of her toes wouldn't sing. There was a kiddie got hers here last spring; Kissed the doll blind. Then she tried to kiss me. Now it's December and hell's here to stay Three blessed weeks. Folks ain't Christians today. People like sheep keep forgetting the Child; Till the mob starts to make a good and runs wild ; And the rush in our aisles would scare any subway. 157 158 TOYLAND Heaven's a fairy tale. Last night I dreamed There was toyland in heaven where star drop lights gleamed On women, that prayed for girl babies and boys, The way little Becky wants dollies and toys. There were sales-lady angels — so silly it seemed. Peconic, y-^i-14 PAW T THE CANCER WARD HEY nurse their bullets in their breasts where babies' blissful lips have hung. On cheeks that lovers' lips caressed, the livid w^ounds of life lie bare. In eyes that harbored happiness, where pain has long out- lived despair, The last dumb terror of the brute that lurks and wakes and slumbers there. Draws near to death and cannot die ; and murders prayer. You too were young. Poets have sung to you perhaps. Your lover's prayers you once disdained. But you were pure and pitiful and perfect as the drifted snow That hides a little garden plot, the ward's last window far below. Where winter prunes his roses red. And you were born the brute to know That masters man, and makes of him a spirit stained, that earth has chained. A drunkard beat you on the breast. A saint has touched your finger tips. A hero's hands your heart have pressed. For you have lived and you have learned i6i 1 62 THE CANCER WARD Of joy and pain to savor life. And you have languished, you have yearned, And you have thrilled through ecstasies. And you have snatched at joys unearned. And you till dust to dust returned, have smiled with true and trembling lips. Brave heart behind the sheeted screen: dull lives that still to ashes fall: Plesh where one cinder eating all, one throbbing ache for all you lost, Alone alive, forswears the prayers a nursing sister breathes acrost A gulf as great as Dives saw: the fire of life your em- bers cost; You who were rich and radiant: you who like Lazarus lost all. No heaven hereafter waits for you. In life alone is your reward. But beauty wavers in one smile that meets the weary watcher's eyes. And loveliness may waken love as strong as life that never dies. A second's sick surcease from pain has made a poignant paradise. THE CANCER WARD 163 And out of horror springs a hope; and healing brings from things abhorred. The armies of the nations march: the singers of the na- tions see; The surgeons of the nations hear in pain a life that labors long; Till master minds of science find its antitoxins sure and strong: Till suffering a symphony is made, a mighty marching song: Till from the spirit's agonies is born the better day to be. Paris, 5-11-1^ CHRIST IN THE ASYLUM THE long excursion train has stopped and slowly through the snow, Through Sunday morning's holiness of woods and hills they go; The black procession of the poor, to see their sick to- day. Some carry tawdry Christmas gifts. Some dumb lips try to pray. For Christ has come to Hades here, to herd with the insane. Since we evict Him from the Church and crown Him from the brain. Our modern minds His faith forget. But here are hearts as old As hunger, pain and horror, and hopelessness and cold. The winter sun between the bars as merciless as time Betrays the faces marred and scarred, reveals the years' gray grime; The women old that God forgot, that man has wasted here, The faces of defeat and death, the eyes of endless fear. One plucks a rose to pieces. One stooping, squinting crone 164 CHRIST IN THE ASYLUM 165 Who wears a rag bag on her back, grins at a grama- phone, One hugs a squalid doll and whines, and watches hours that were, When laughter and all loveliness her children shared with her. O mad Madonna of the slums that some one loved and lost ; Gray ghosts and failures of us all: O souls success has cost; There runs a whisper through the wards to lighten lives forlorn. Today of some dead prostitute a child to us is born. Today the foul, the piteous, the shyster and the shrew, With remnants of life's bargain sales make offerings to you. They fill this fester spot with flowers. They make their morgue a shrine. For they are pilgrims poor of love, that lost is still divine. Kind's Park, L. I., 12-28-12 MILL CHILDREN WE have forgotten how to sing. Our laughter Is a godless thing: listless and loud and shrill and sly. We have forgotten how to smile. Our lips, our voices are too vile. For each of us, a living lie, Each old, each cold, each carnal face is childhood's death and black disgrace. We all are dead before we die. Our mothers' mothers made us so. The fathers that we never know, in blindness and in wantonness, Caused us to come to question you. What is it that you others do, that profit so by our distress? If all your millions made the mill, why is It then that never still it murders us, both day and night? You and your little children sleep. We and our mothers vigil keep. You cheated us of all delight. Ere our sick spirits came to birth you made our fair and fruitful earth, a nest of pestilence and blight. Your black machines are never still, and hard, relent- less as your will, they card us like the cotton waste. And flesh and blood more cheap than they, they seize and eat and shred away, to feed the fever of your haste. For we are waste and shoddy here, who know no god, no faith but fear; no happiness, no hope but sleep. i66 MILL CHILDREN 167 Half imbecile and half obscene we sit and tend each tense machine, too sick to sigh, too tired to weep, Until the tortured end of day, when fevered faces turn away, to see the stars from blackness leap. Hardest of all is this to bear, that somewhere in the upper air, there may be heaven we never know. Beyond the blackness children may from dreams of love look up to-day to hear their mothers whisper low. But here the mill's unbending roar, calls us and curses more and more, God's curse on men who know Him not. And night and morn to the Most High, we march God's conscripts born to die, till love at last makes bright our lot : Till in the shapes of filth and fear that you have starved and stolen here, you find the children God for- got. Peconic, p-i8-i^ GUTTER SLIME WE are your wounds. We are j'our fevers and festering sores, and your failures and faults; Sick in field hospitals, stragglers, camp followers foul, where life's long column halts; Where your cities are camps, treasure heaps of the ages you looted, of earth that your strong men despoil. And you sit on their summits. We creep round the edges and snarl at your sentinels. Starving we toil. We are defeat. We are the danger, the germs in the street, in the food that you eat at your ease. We are disease that is lying in wait for the weak, for your children. We faint and we freeze. We drink and we fall in the gutters. We crawl in the gutters. We crawl and we fall where you left us to crawl and fall. And the drink and the drugs that you sell us shall surfeit you too till you pay for us all. We are despair. We are past prayer. We are horror that hopelessly shudders and dies in the dark; Hunger and hate and black shame that comes back to you making its mark, i68 GUTTER SLIME 169 Blasting your sons; the sick pain of dumb beasts, and strong sorrow gone mad. We are your weakness you waste. Shall we ever look up at last, learn to be glad? We are your goal. For your soul that you starve, when you starve us shall cease to be blind. And your mind that you madden with haste, something mightier shall find Than the money that crushes us down, that distorts, that shall cripple you too. Till you learn to believe in the least of us, serving a gospel made new. We are your God in the germ, till we suffer and struggle with you, Out of the slime to make soul. Peconic, g-ip-i^ CJMP FOLLOPVERS ONCE we were as you were, children, cherished, prayed for, born to bless; Bought with pain and labor lasting, white as April snow is white; Fragrant as a bed of roses, living lips of happiness Moulded by a mother's kisses; eyes of laughter and delight. But that beauty faded early as the snowflakes in the night. Once we were as you were, women, beasts of burden for the race; Slaves by caves and cords imprisoned till our masters dared to sleep. So we bore them stronger warriors, found a surer hiding place. And the flame of life flashed upward and the ape forgot to creep, And the mothers of our mothers learned at last to love and weep. Once we walked in folk migrations, once with emperors we rode; Mistresses of mighty monarchs ordering the world's ad- vance. Once we taught all art to triumph, in your temples we abode. 170 CAMP FOLLOPVERS 171 Once we smiled at minnie-singers, ordered love to lift his lance, Setting armored squadrons spurring at a whisper or a glance. Once we were like flames devouring flinging men across the sea, Licking gold from Montezumas ; gold that we divide today With the men that death subduing share their spoils with you and me — You the nun, the saint, the matron ; you the wife he hides away; You his body bearing children; I his mind to mount and play. You may pray in guarded houses. We go following his camps^ — For us both he fights and triumphs. We have shared his sorest need. Through the deserts pioneering, where defeat his ashes stamps. Still his farthest watch fires sharing we shall nurse with hands that bleed Sinking flames of life that falter. Deeper in his heart we read. 172 CAMP FOLLOWERS You despise us, you abhor us. But you copy us today, Wear our dresses, learn our dances, paint your flesh that we despise, Like our own. In turn your children one by one we lure away. And each lonely lost street walker of the nations in our eyes Is a sentinel of heaven's host advancing to the skies. New York, 1-15-12 THE BREAD LINE WHEN winter has besieged the world with want and storm and snow, And hail like bullets sweeps the street, and winds begin to blow Like roaring ranks of ruin loud at twilight: Corporal Cold And Captain Hunger line us up, sick boys and men as old As the dead hopes that once we hugged, the ghosts of loves we sold. For some of us, the happy ones, this is the last review; The last inspection of a life. This brother, man, is you; This hulk that coughs his heart, his hope, his heaven, his hell away. For you whose god lies lapped in lace, whose harlot's hands betray All manhood; here, when midnight strikes, tonight is judgment day. For cold shall search us pore by pore; each cell that sin has tried, That pain and fear and sickness scourged, that hunger •crucified. It stiffens us. In rigid ranks we shuffle, marking time, 173 174 THE BREAD LINE Till from your church where Christ is cold, there sounds a silver chime. Till one by one, our rations drawn, the slum takes back its slime. But even so for some of us whose souls are sinking here, There comes a glow that heats the heart through frozen hours of fear. A vision floats and forms for us through bar room fumes, and where Your coppers club us into holes where sewage fills the air. Where vice and vermin eat us up; you too who drove us there. We see you on your sick beds then, your sons and daughters too, Drawing near to fear, to midnight, to the Devil's dread review. And you rave and cry for rations, drops of drugs, a woman's tears As slowly strained, lost words of love. That vision disappears While we shuffle through the snow drifts and the seconds slow as years. THE BREAD LINE 175 For the armies of Messiah march unresting day and night, Out of darkness, from the jungles, from your cities up to light. Out of hospitals, from sweat shops, out of dive and mine and mill, Spent and wasted we are marching past the last frontiers of will, Where the last grim Surgeon sifts us; where you shrink and shudder still. S.S. Chicago, 4-13-13 THE LOCK-STEP THERE'S the warden's little toddler at a window in the sun, Looking down and laughing at us as we pass him one by one. And I wonder if he wonders why we never stride or run. There are tears and cries and anguish when a baby comes to birth; When he breaks his way from prison. He may murder all your mirth, He may kill your best and dearest, yet you yield him all the earth. And he stumbled as we stumbled. And he trembles as he tries To come closer to his mother, till his eyes adore her eyes. And you lift him when he's crawling till he's looking at the skies. If he's soiled and hurt and hungry, he is dearer to her then, Dearer since in her he suffers. We were babies more than men. And we blundered forth to freedom till j^ou beat us back again. 176 THE LOCK-STEP 177 You are children. You are cruel. Yesterday you had to crawl. Out of mud the ages made us. And today a bar, a wall, Is the only thing that damns us and divides us from you all. We are conscripts of consumption and perdition, drawn by lot, That you drill and waste and murder in your barracks black that rot. We are fear you make your fetish, wounded souls your faith forgot. Make your prisons of tomorrow a white hospital of life. Here today is Satan's cloister. Here you sharpen every knife. Here you hide the black byproducts of your greed and lust and strife. You go limping through a lockstep long as ours. But this we know: Hopes forlorn of life go creeping till its black Bastile shall go, Till our bodies fill the ditch, our wrongs its walls shall overthrow. 178 THE LOCK-STEP And the warden's baby watching us is wiser far than you For he knows light kindles light. He smiles and some of us smile too. For he knows that life is lovely — life our murdered boy- hood knew. Los Angeles, 1^-24-13 IN HOSPITAL BECAUSE my mother's blood was thin, My father, life's young spendthrift, I. The child of sickness old as sin, Here year by year in prison lie. We have a chapel, white and still, A nunnery whose litanies In pain's long service swell and thrill ; And I am weary, Lord, of these. Pain was my sister. Silently I hugged her to my baby breast. Until I learned her smile to see As closer still her child she pressed. Today her fingers come and go. They numb my pulses, as the night Weighs down the noon. I never know The wonders of your world of light. I see the sheeted bodies pass, To life's last altar, or the place Where the white surgeons say their mass. And break life's body for the race. This is our sacrifice for fear And blindness. I have lived to see 179 i8o IN HOSPITAL How some of us must suffer here To make tomorrow's millions free: Till death's last anaesthetic gray Shall slowly drift and dissipate, Till unseen surgeons lift away All pain, and crooked souls are straight. Peconic, 3-13-14 THE OLD PARIS lay in the moonlight, Paris asleep and white, Till across the court of my hotel I heard a cough in the night. Horrible, hoarse, and choking, like the voice of death that lags When the mind is blind, and the soul is sick, and furled its battle flags: And life is a slow surrender, and the flesh is torn to rags. Life is a slow surrender at last for every one. They steal the light of day from us, and the splendor of the sun. And each breath that we draw, draws nearer, coughing or crooning slow, The old, old songs that we used to sing in the sunlight long ago. To the darkness, and the silence, and the end that none can know. Life is a slow surrender to the legions of the years: All that we worked and wept for once, at last the urge of tears. Strength of the hand, and muscles like armies drilled to die. All melodies that fill the ear, all flowers that thrill the eye, i8i 1 82 THE OLD Beauty of waves and women, noon ; midnight and morn- ing's sky: Scent of pale violets in the woods, of new mown hay and brine, All savor of our daily bread, all wonder waked in wine, Warmth of our children's kisses, clasping of clinging hands: All these Thy gifts, we give Thee, Lord, who learn Thy law's commands. Till sick and old and shivering the soul a beggar stands. We lay upon Thy altar, Lord, a friend's last loving smile, A love's last letter, memories of gold that gleam awhile, Of all things glad and tender, of all things fair and true. Life is a slow surrender of all we dream and do: Till the last pale embers smoulder cold, and the last frail hour wears through. Life that to this year's living devotes each spring gone by That gave us all, who giving our lives, at rest shall lie : Life is a slow surrender of all our outworks. Still THE OLD 183 We hold one citadel of thought, whose starving souls still thrill To triumphs new, new battles fought by thought im- mortal wrought of will. Peconic, 6-6-14 BLIND YOU look at shadows all your lives, a world of shadows. Once I saw The shifting surfaces of things, the masks that men and women wear. The rags of beauty long outworn, whose flesh has failed, where greed and care Have made all little things of life the sordid letters of its law. Once all was agony. The light like life itself went day by day. Blind panic died. I tried to make a million records, could not choose Out of the world that slipped from me, the last to see, the last to loose. Till like an abscess lanced, the worst with the last day- light went away. Since I had lost myself in light and freedom that you waste as well; In my black prison cell for life I stumbled, groping maimed and sore. I w^recked my soul against the wall. I went on falling through the floor Into the void whose heart reveals that heaven is here as near to hell, 184 BLIND 185 As light and shadow. I was lost. I clutched at what was nearest. Long I clung to kindness, to the hands whose clasp brought back my friends to me. I felt the love I once forgot, I was too close to, once, to see. I heard it till I knew at last, each word of welcome was a song. So I began to give myself. Once I had taken, wasted all. Since I had nothing else to give, I gave my greetings snatched from pain. And trembling smiles, till people brought their trials to me. And once again I have a world for working in. Today it claims me when I call. We see the stars at night alone. Its shadows pale illusion sends. From sunrise to the dusk of day, to veil all vital things. At last From my close cloister of despair, from one gray, wasted world I passed, Into another where I see the spirit faces of my friends. 1 86 BLIND The soul of beauty still is mine; that mothers feel but cannot say, When first their first-born's lips they press; like sound beyond all symphonies. And all the awful vast of space is lit with living stars like these, Till all the pain that mars His face dies as God's shadows die today. Peconic, ^-14-14 PEOPLE COMMUTERS THE western window of their world was open wide to heaven today, Till eight o'clock slammed down the shade and trains went whirling them away. The morning papers poisoned dawn, with rape and murder, greed and lies. They saw the city from the ferry; the altars high of sacrifice, Where beauty strives < with steel and granite, and men of slime make merchandise. New hopes and fair ambitions there were written round their lips in light. And strangers marched as brothers, where young loves touched finger tips at sight. They saw a road of glory laid across the tide-way for an hour. They vanished in the shadows slowly where cliffs of windows blindly tower, Where greed's slow ambuscades are lurking, and men must pay their price for power. Blithe feet on furtive errands went and gracious fingers ruin wrote. From discontent to discontent they grew. Harsh note on harsher note, 189 I90 COMMUTERS The ferry whistles through the fog outroared the clamor of the cars. Young eyes grew sordid and despairing and eager spirits chafed their bars, While men and masters of tomorrow built up their city towards the stars. Day after day and year on year they were besieged until they died, By office shadows, by the streets where life is cursed and crucified. And boyhood's dreams were smeared with mud. One gave her youth and ten their tears; Life seemed to some a barren service. And they were starved of prayers and fears, That women for their children cherish who triumph o'er their iron years. The charge wins home within our w^alls, and catapult and mangonel On trembling platforms creak and strain, around our island citadel. Like haggard women once in Greece whose bleeding fingers wrought amain. From their own hair the bowstring's plaiting while boys snatched arrows from the slain COMMUTERS 191 That dying, fighting men might glory in Athens born in light again: Their millions pale to battle march when daylight ends the truce of God. His splendor through His loopholes see at dawn and twilight. Heads that nod At noon in languor, may not know the charges and the counter-calls. But deathlessness is in their dreaming and strength in every tear that falls, To stay this city's soul, that kneeling from battle builds up reeling walls. S.S. Shidzuoka Maru, 1-18-14 NINE O'CLOCK YOU housed and hid corruption: in darkness bred disease, You laid upon -the children your lusts and infamies. You starved them and you cheated their lives of all delight. You made the air of heaven a sickness in the night. You blinded them to beauty, their sunshine stole away, And still the children come to school to make you young today. And some are dumb to gladness, and some forget to smile, And some are vile and cruel, and some are tame and vile. And half of them are hungry, and faces foul and gray, Small ghosts of lives no woman loves go with them. They obey The old primeval evils, the old primeval pains That bore them and begat them, that fester in their veins. They are your want and weaknesses, the children of your greed. The price you pay for pleasure. By their sorrow you succeed. Their faces are your failures. In filth and gutter slime I02 NINE O'CLOCK 193 You slip with them and stumble through by-wajs black of time Whose fever and infection you harbor in your haste. And you that cheapen seconds here, tomorrow's aeons waste. But out of evil surges an urge to better things, And in their cries and curses a living spirit sings. And life that in the lifetime of stars we learn to weigh, Has made this school a block house of freedom for to- day. And here the children herding from the terrors in the night Look up and see one loophole that leads at last to light. Not yet, life's laboratories and armories of will. Our schools may win our war for us, for life to live must kill. And still in black battalions, the children passing by, Must struggle through these streets of shame where life to live must die. For this their mothers bore them, our raw recruits who are The armies of the broken road we build from star to star. Los Angeles J 11-4-13 THE WIRETAPPER OUT of the dark when the streets are still, through a city that sleeps, in its hive of stone, When night is a smoke, where its swarms are laid ; Then rises a sound like a hammer of hoofs on the trail of the wires, a heart that's afraid, Pounding in terror, lost and alone. And it knocks and it knocks, like a soul that seeks, break- ing the locks, and the bounds of space. To leap to its own; till all longing dies. And quick as the click of a key, somewhere I can see despair in a woman's eyes, In the letters of death that my fingers trace. Out of the night where the ether thrills, and the heart of hills is a deathless dance, Of atoms that pulse to the lift of life. There comes an echo of worlds at war, of light and darkness locked in strife, Sweating the scum of circumstance. A child is born. And I watch by day, and into a slum while a gambler waits; I relay word of a horse that wins, From a stock exchange, where the greed of a race places its bets on a nation's sins. I preach the price of your lost estates. 194 THE WIRETAPPER 195 My faith is filtered. No longer alone I knock on the wall of a cell in the night. My laboratory of life is stirred By the deep sea cables and wires, and the nerves of a sense that grows till all sound is heard, Like the lenses serving our larger sight. For once at college something I saw, a strange machine with its wires and rods And it measured pressures of mind and will. And here in the shadows I see the light. I trace life's records; when all is still, Register scales for the works of gods. Los Angeles, 11-21-13 THE AIRMAN I WENT soaring through the sunshine, when the noon was hot and high. I rose in ranging spirals, like a maelstrom made to fly. I made my upper level, and I cut my motor free. And I catapulted down a mile. Then I began to be One free pulse of man's perfection and his larger liberty: And a thought of life incarnate in a boundless brain of blue. I rose throbbing through the silences, and clouds I clambered through; Till the twilight came acreeping as the tide sets back to land. From the night that still lay sleeping. I began to under- stand How men mount to me^t tomorrow from the ocean's slime and sand. To the sea cliffs, to the tree tops, to the snow peaks, on they came; Wave on wave of will and hunger, pulse on pulse of force and flame; Past the glaciers, past the lava, deserts, forests, faltered far. They left the night of jungles. They went steering by a star, 196 THE AIRMAN 197 From those jungles, in the ether where lost suns like orchids are. These grew large when twilight loomed, when I had plumbed the curve of time : Endless spirals round the planets past dead tribes too tired to climb, Endless g)^res where eagles's pinions ghostly pathways pioneered, For high hearts that ride the whirlwind. To my soar- ing soul appeared All men made, and all their marching, till a trail to heaven they reared. All processionals of peril till our best began to be, Born of men that held the hills, and made their highways over sea. I was free in space forever. Then my essence thinned and failed ; Then my motor died, and faster flashing through the air I sailed; Fell through wider spirals still, till through earth's shadow slow I trailed. There was rest and food, and human hearts and hands, and help and heat. 198 THE AIRMAN All our vital stores renewing, till our motor's tireless beat Dies beyond the daylight's limit, past the outer surf of air; We shall seek our new worlds out, to harbors new for- ever fare, Where man mounts to meet tomorrow; masters life for- ever there. S.S. Scotian, y-iS-ll THE SIGNAL TOWER I SEE the warp and woof of things cross and re- cross in strands of steel. I shift my levers one by one, my switches in the moon- light throw. I hold the keys of life and death. I master them today. I know My schedules as you know 3/our hand. My hands a giant keyboard feel, And more than music's harmonies the silences to me reveal. For my piano stretches far between two cities, thirty miles And more. I strike my chords across the big black sound- ing-box of night. I play them up. And rolling true, a mile a minute's blurr of light, The Limited goes flaming by. A woman at a window smiles, A forger sees success. A fool the dullness of his life reviles. A baby wakes. His mother's smile, her tense caress un- seen is mine. A lover sees his sweetheart near. A widow's heart brings home her dead. 199 200 THE SIGNAL TOfVER I break their motives with a jar. I halt them with a wreck ahead. I seize their thoughts that wander dazed, and breathless fear with faith combine; Then in a second's sure crescendo, I send them clanging down the line. By day I halt them here and there, my iron ritual enforce. I drill their souls undisciplined. I give and take the right of way. I am tomorrow's ministrant. My crossroad's altar of to- day They all pay tribute to; obey the hand I hold across their course ; The strongest and the weak as well. Against my will is no resource. And here in trembling and in fear I deal with life that leaps to me. For once one second saved a wreck. And every second death that lurks In fire and fog may break the leash I hold on him and all his works. And time will take his sacrifice. And greed and speed relentlessly, Must fling their children to the flames, that so the millions may go free. THE SIGNAL TOWER 201 I serve the millions. Stronger hands than mine thrust back the specters stark. Blindfold I shuttle destinies. I send them on to ends un- known ; Strong soldiers of the centuries and lives that sink in shame alone. I set my semaphores, that men starting from sodden slumbers mark, Who by their living worship life that drives them blindly through the dark. Los Angeles, ii-i^-ij THE CONSTRUCTION GANG THEY caught us in the steerage when they brought us over sea; They tagged us with their tickets and they crowded us in cars; They rolled us to a railhead of an empire yet to be, One night beneath the stars. In the blackness of the bunkhouse we were waked before the dawn. And they gave us pick and crowbar, taught us how to heave and strike. Where across a dusty desert two thin strands of steel were drawn, Side by side and just alike. We went working through the sage brush where an ocean once went dry. In a country cursed with devils like the heavens over- head, And they burned to scattered clinkers saw-toothed moun- tains round the sky. Till the last dim cloud was dead. To the country of the cactus we came slowly day by day. Tie by tie we bound the levels, foot by foot we filled the grade ; 202 THE CONSTRUCTION GANG 203 And we strained the sagging cables of a power house far away Up the road our hands had made. And the sand storms tried to blind us, and the winds like devils danced, Till the air was black at noonday. And the desert's maddened soul Rose to wrestle with our working and to rave. But we advanced Step by step, and grasped our goal. For our brothers came to meet us from the mountains and the sea. And we spliced the line at Summit; drove the spike that marked the end ; And we floated dow^n to Frisco where the barkeep mixes free, Just as long as luck's your friend. We put money on the tables and our manhood on the bars. We who made tomorrow nearer for the world that waits to ride. Till we straggled back from brothels to the open where the stars See the desert's doors flung wide. Los Angeles, ii-f-i^ THE LINESMAN CAN'T 5'0ii see them through the ages, smoking flares by lava lit, Waxen torches, Tyre and Sidon's galley lamps, that float and flit Past night's narrowing frontier; temple lanterns, cres- sets high Greece and Venice and Japan gave the globe to worship by, Gave the tribes of men that marching like the lights, must live and die? There were beacons on the hills, there were burning spires and towers. Light went leaping round the world and blossomed forth in flaming flowers, Till the ages dark were ended. Candles guttered. Oil they drew From the veins of earth, new gases flickered, flags of flame for you. Leading science; searching, finding larger lights and clearer, too. Out of air and out of ether, came new tremblings through the night. Man that takes the pulse of life, has found her fevered, sweating light; 204 THE LINESMAN 205 Curried her with brazen brushes, spurred her on with spikes of fire; Furnaces and dynamos he trained and tuned ; now to their choir Rivers harnessed to his service bring new notes of man's desire. So the lights march on. I see them in the jungles, in the mirk ; Lurking shadows flee before them, in the slums where men must work, In steel caisson-coffins dying; in the mines that keep you warm ; Finding power, that seaborne marches faster still through fog and storm. Swarms of light, new regiments of life I lead; from mid- night form. Through your mist filled mills I send them, where wet cotton lint like snow Covers children, coughing, falling, ulcered lives too sick to grow. There I show you sin and shame. My searchlight fingers I display. Shifting, feeling past all perils. I make midnight bright as day. 2o6 THE LINESMAN Where your cities focus life that festers, I make white its way. Now new stars and constellations through your streets and meadows shine. Past your footlights I lead joy. Laboratory, school and shrine, I have sentineled; your surgeons reinforced. Where mothers see Lives that leap to light from midnight, I have tolled to set you free — I, the midwife of your spirits, bring to light your years to be. Peconicj 6-2/— i/f THE ACCOUNTANT HERE is eternity today, God's body broken to your hands. You let it slip and fall away or mold it to your soul's de- mands. All things must pass, the current flows. Your vortex ring of will as well A zero or one unit shows in man's account of heaven and hell. Not to be nothing — I am one of millions toiling in the dark For wages bare from sun to sun, who see far lights of life, and mark Some muflled thunder of applause when man the master conquers time. Out of new matter forges laws that force a million souls to climb. God sends new Prophets in our day. Darwin and Wal- lace pioneered For Spencer and the rest the way, till a new heaven and earth appeared. Crooks, Haeckel, Curie, Edison, Marconi, Metchnikoff, Carrel, Pasteur and Erlich, all have won for men new issues forth from hell: Hell that is waste in rotting flesh, in ulcered streets and and souls as well. 207 2o8 THE ACCOUNTANT God writes new scriptures hour by hour. Of all His scribes I am the least. I list men's lusts, their greed for power in ledgers black. Where soul and beast Wrestle and writhe and rise and fall, I chart a nation's fever curve. I cast its belance. Least of all thy scribes of truth: I also serve. Had I the power of Parkman blind, but regent of his life- time, then: The awful annals of the mind, this sudden rush of thought to men, I should set forth in order, show how doubt and dogma still go back. New searchlights through mean streets would throw, through each soul alley, foul and black. New antiseptics of the brain announce, in tense detail relate How Christ has come to earth again, how God is man and masters fate. Today flames forth a new crusade, the last the sternest creed of all. For man the ape by ages made mounts to the stars, though churches fall. THE ACCOUNTANT 209 He spreads his wings; his airships soar. New tremblings through the ether thrill, New messengers of fire adore his more immune, immortal will. One letter of that Gospel learned, one text of freedom to proclaim. With loftier faith than e'er discerned the martyr's eye: I suffer shame, I gave my body to be burned, I send my soul to feed the flame. S.S.Dunbea, 2-10-14 MOVIES BROADWAY'S one big moving picture. Where I sit I see it plain, Typing letters by my window while they come and go again, People passing, millions, always, until midnight shifts the reels. There are days I see it, hear it, seem to know just how it feels. There are days life seems so near that I could touch it in the street, Kiss them all, both men and women, bring their wasted lives to meet. There are days they glide like shadows through the mist with muffled tread. And my soul goes out to seize them through the air that drags like lead. They go silently like shadows through the shadow cold and gray. Color stolen from their faces, thought and purpose drained away Faster still to feed the lights that flame forever for suc- cess. Moving shadow-shapes of pain and toil that fails in loneli- ness. 210 MOVIES 211 Shadow pictures, bloodless, lifeless. Yet we watch them though we know Life is on the hills, the ocean, in green woods where all things grow. Shadow shapes as gray and grimy as the parts of time's machine, Grinding life across the city with gray daylight for a screen. Over there is life, but here our life persists and tone- lessly Struggles on between the seats where millions more like me may see. Millions more like me, all marching toward tomorrow past today. We can see the frauds, the failures, see weak faces on their way. Cold and gray they move forever. They are marching past despair. Past defeat, to better things, to larger light, to clearer air. On the altar of tomorrow casting all, till time reveals Ail we doubted, feared, despairing of the ending of the reels. 212 MOVIES \Vc have made the pictures move and mirror life that wins at last, Records new to stir tomorrow, purpose new that brings the past Back to make the people live, the blind to see, my brain to know How my fingers hammering each key have helped today to grow. New York, 6-22-14 THE PIT I WENT sinking from the sunlight and the faces of my friends, Till at last the}^ never knew me. I went sinking deeper yet; Drinking death by inches warm, and wet, and fighting to forget ; Killing longing, killing thinking, into night that never ends. One warm wave reached up and splashed me, smeared my footing where I stood, Where the city's cliifs and ledges built frail bridges o'er the pit ; Sieve on sieve that lets you through or lets you cling. Last night I could Scent salvation in the spring, and feel that I still was heir to it. One warm wave reached up and swept me where God lets His gutters reek, Where lost women sob at midnight, shriek and shudder; till I stood Where the pressure of the millions crushes down the sick and weak, Every will life wastes still, slowly to the slime's last brotherhood. 213 214 THE PIT I ate garbage in the gutters. I lay noisome in the sun. Scrubbed spittoons for drink to drug me, stole from chil- dren and the blind, Wrote love letters for a harlot, shared her wages: one by one Learned each secret shame that festers in the flesh of humankind. Something saved me: for the pit has tides that rise and fall and rise. I woke up one morning early, heard the trolleys clank and jar. Through their sound a woman sang a song I knew. I raised my eyes, From a pier head saw the sunrise: knew each cinder hides a star. On the street I found a friend. I turned from him, then took his hand. Took his clothes, his food, his faith ; let him find me work to do ; Found that I had not forgotten how to love. I under- stand Why the pit for man's salvation must persist the ages through. THE PIT 215 There man tries the strength of love. God Almighty's mercy knows. We can never love the happy in our happiness as well As the soul that still must suffer, lavishing all life it owes On the human hands and hearts whose loving lifts the lost from hell. Peconic, /'-^0-i4 MOODS KINSHIP AT DAVOS I RODE through the rain on m}' vvaj^ that day; (Thirty miles pedalled through drizzle and mud) Till I took the train. And I thirsted for blood. And I couldn't hear all that the mountains say — " If you can't be as big and as high as we are Be as big as you can." And I looked from the car At the flanks of the hills like two walls that were green And the torrents that tore the gray boulders between. And they sang as they flowed, '' We must fall who were free, There are rocks in our road. But we run to the sea." And the steam of the train as it writhed and it hissed Like a snake as it mounted, was lost in the mist ; Till only the pine tops stood clear of the gray Like souls that have sunk to their shoulders in clay. Then over the summit we slithered at last. With the wheels rolling faster. The mists breaking fast Watched a world that to wonder and terror awoke, And into decision's gray valley we broke. Then I came to a kurhaus and cursed at the rain. Till I looked at the souls that lay languid in pain. And one of them rose looking ruddy and strong. Now he hails me in English — Tonight we belong To the kinship of blood and of brains and of heart,^ That can make of life's moments an altar and art. 219 220 KINSHIP AT DAVOS He was human that Hollander. Things that he told They shall glow in my mind when the world has grown old. And he laughed at my stories with death in his face. There were books we both loved. Oh! the grayest dis- grace Is to go through one's life like a stock or a stone, And to suffer, and stumble, and struggle alone. Davos, y-so-i2 A REST LAST night I dreamed of you. I had not seen you Or heard from you for weeks. I tried to pass What once was wonder's door. You came and called me. There was Ruth's message, better said than written. And so I stood; found in your fire once more the last of earth's enigmas. You had a concert later, yet you let me stay. Tomorrow was Aida. I might take you. So for an hour we sat where I could see you Between the twilight and the boulevard, That blazed below with lights like golden days In life's long darkness, with thin pools of rain Like stormy memories that mirrored — nothing much. Little you said. Your words were like the notes Of chords that silence long alone completes. And I said less. Yet for a space our spirits hand in hand Wondered at all the hours we men and women waste In noise and restlessness. I seemed to hear The tuning up of life's last orchestra. We for a moment struck the pitch together there. I know that stronger, surer hands than ours Must set the score and hold the leader's baton : 222 A REST That never once again in unison we might sound strings that snap, Life and the tempered tolerance of time, That life interprets to its worshipers. You w^ere too tense too often. But last night You rested as your hands rest on a note Stretched like a golden wire that binds our hearts To the hereafter and the past together. Nothing more I wanted then: until I woke to face This world that out of heartbreak wins today. Los Angeles, 11-2^-13 w FLOOD TIDE 'HEN things are running crossvvays till each nerve cries out in pain, When a thousand clanging hammers of the street beat in my brain, There comes a day when I drift away to an island of re- pose, And I lie in my swaying hammock where the gray tide water flows. I lie in my hammock on the porch till the grayness turns to blue And the morning lifts the mist that shifts to make day fit for you, And the tide comes creeping landward as the sun comes climbing high, And the little winds of the morning go rippling through the sky. And the little waves on the beaches thrill where the grasses nod and dip. And earth and sea are lovers, and lip comes home to lip. And your voice is softly singing through long lessons of delight. And the birds are winging round the flame unseen, serene and white; 223 224 FLOOD TIDE High on 5'oiir hearth's bare altar, in the shadows where I see A form that flits by a window where life smiles back at me. Then I know why the Lord of our breathlessness, our haste, our waste and fret, Can lift us up on His tides of light for a season, to for- get; The sunken reefs of our cities, and the wrecks that drift and sink, Flotsam of fears and prayers and tears and torments; and I think That we live in a tideless ocean, till a tide that rises high Shall lift us up past moon and stars' white tide marks in the sky, Till the last lost shipwrecked life on earth has grown too great to die. River head, y-g-14 PLEIN AIR I SIT in the open country beneath my apple trees, And the winds walk up to talk with me. There all the sky one sees, And my heart's for the far horizons and the little creeping things ; A bird in the grass, and a flower in the field. A grub un- folds its wings. And my fancy flits and soars with him and sings where rivers run, Out in the open country I go swimming in the sun. And a motor hoots down the highway, and my thoughts go travelling back To the city's crowded prison cells where life lies on the rack ; To the streets that they smear with shadows till the strongest slip and fall. Out in the open country there is life and light for all. And the sky is a high cathedral where all the nights and days They kindle lights of worship; and life is prayer and praise. A ploughman rounds his furrows in rituals as old As the incense he sets free for me. A painter gets his gold From buttercups in the meadow and sunlij^ht on the brook. 225 226 PLEIN AIR A bee goes stealing honey where I begin my book. And nine little yellow goslings go down the sea to seek, And the life that lives in the marshes. A boat beats up the creek. A baby beats on a window. And I think of the souls that crawl Past counters heaped with human hearts, from office wall to wall. Where the tickers time the tiring hearts of greed and a gray desire. Out in the open country today is a golden fire. And the sun mounts up to midday till all the air is light. And the clouds are the breath of God Himself who gives us day and night. He is here in the air around us. And His words are the winds of May. He is there in the hearts that hold Him fast and take Him home today. Where babes are burned to Moloch, and offered blindly there To the greed and grime of millions, in the horror and despair, Where a baby beats at a window, two pennies clutching tight. Till life, the mother, takes today and lifts it up to light. Peconicj ^-28-14 SATURDAY'S TRAIN SATURDAY'S train is always late. We stand on a plaform of splintered planks, Until New York for a marvelous minute into our cosmos slides and clanks. The mail bag falls, trunks hit the floor, and people in turn on the steps appear; Portraits framed in a vestibule door, with their faces smil- ing and flushed and dear. And the girls on the platform chatter and kiss and hug as they hang on each other's necks, And we hustle them off to our motors and rigs, and we grab their bags and their coats and checks. And the motors and rigs are standing in ranks around the door of a corner store. And one of us waits outside for the mail where the farm- ers tramp like the train on the floor. And we get our letters and look at the news, and we pay for peaches and cigarettes. Oars and raisins, and tennis shoes, and talcum powder and landing nets. And we gossip and race to the cross roads. Then, one after another we glide away Down our own little lane in the heart of the woods that leads to light by the side of the bay. 227 228 SATURDAY'S TRAIN In mid-Manhattan in mid- July from my office window I gaze afar Past the haze of heat and the smoking roofs to the shallows cool where our beaches are. And I see the faces of people that paint, people that write, and the rest that wait On a splintered platform, week after week, for a Saturday train that is sure to be late. Henry and Edith, Helen and Charles, and a score besides through the heat rays swim: And the children, Isabelle, Betty and Jack, Richard and Caroline, Babs and Bim. And I want to get back to the paths they tread, to the flowers they find, to the wind in the trees, And the sailing dories and motor boats, and the sound and the sweep and the color of seas. There's a weed in a crack in the bathhouse floor. There's a window low where I watch the moon. Thei^e's a curve in the creek where the fireflies flash. There are stars in the trees, I shall see them soon. And the old gray station's an altar of life, and its pilgrim armies each Sabbath ascend To the worship of winds in the open air, and the shrines in your soul where you find your friend. SATURDAY'S TRAIN 229 There's maybe a heaven hereafter, yes. But I guess that it never can be complete Without that station two rods or less from the end of the shadowy settlement street; Without the faces you're sweating to find at the end of a lifetime's working day, When your soul from its stupor, dumb and blind, leaps up like a boy's to its last long play. Heaven hereafter? Never you mind. Here's heaven enough for one week on the way. Pe conic, /-^/-/^ WELCOME THERE is a hillside garden that their tender hands have tended, Below a house that holds for me a shrine of joy and light. And there beneath a cloudless sun when June is warm and splendid I see them coming home to me, three girls in garments white. Alice with lilies in her hands, and little dark Dolores Showing her glowing marigolds ; and Iris last of all Under the arbor by the wall of purple morning glories ; Bringing my crimson ramblers back that sought to scale the wall. Alice with smiles along her lips ; Dolores still and tender ; Iris whose eyes can tell me more than tongue shall ever say; They offer to my open arms their bodies soft and slender, Bringing the best of summer here, their garlanded today. Into my study they have swept and brasses from Benares, Vases from Venice they have filled, and hung their wreaths around The portrait where their mother smiles like the tall tran- quil Maries That Perugino used to paint, with hair like sunlight crowned. 230 WELCOME 231 ** Mother Is coming home today." (The words them- selves are singing.) " How long it is," our litany, forgotten, they repeat. Making their last response to love, their last oblation bringing, Till at the hour of evensong, their voices still more sweet, Tremble and sanctify the house where happy hearts shall meet. Yokohama, 12-2^-1^ CHILDREN YOU cannot see the children, 5^ou have hidden them away. In the shadows, in the streets of shame, of souls too tired to play, Of lives too sad to smile at light, that never see the sun ; Toiling on to meet the midnight till the day's long task is done; Toiling, choking in your sweatshops. These you mur- dered one by one. You cannot hear the children. In the noises of your streets You have drowned each sigh of pleasure, dulled each heart that leaps, that beats, Like hillside brooks your greed makes sluggish, stagnant. You have choked their cries. Cries of rapture, slowly ceasing, till tonight's last lulla- bies Through your riot sound like dirges, where love watches love that dies. You cannot feel the children. Kisses sweet as birds at dawn. Fail where wailing, faint and fretful, souls that smiled have starved and gone. All their little least caresses, you have thwarted, thrust aside; 232 CHILDREN 233 Every drowsy head that presses closer home at even tide; Every kiss that lingers, blesses, you have lost in greed and pride. You cannot love the children that you lose and leave alone ; Lives unborn and warped and wasted, while your hearts are turned to stone, In your mills by millions murdered. Like the flow^ers you starved and smeared In lost gardens of your cities; till a shadow black ap- peared Of their anguish, dumb and dreadful, near success by slaves revered. You cannot save the children till you learn yourself to save, Ano the burden of their ruin you must carry to the grave ; Growing cruel, tame and tearless, flesh and spirit frail as well; Butchered by machines by millions, you have left them there in hell; Till their ruin's black infection taints the thing you buy and sell. 234 CHILDREN But you cannot check the children. Life is stronger than your sins, Than your bitterness and blindness; and a fairer day be- gins. They are stirring, they are waking. Out of mill and mine and slum, Like sap in spring, like light at dawn, like life at birth they come ; And their cry becomes a gospel, life's last word on lips long dumb. Peconic, 6-11-14 BED RIDDEN I WAS a child. I lay in bed. They put a bandage round my head And doctors came and looked at me. I was as sick as I could be, And I could hardly smile or see. But sometimes that the sky was blue I knew. When most I longed for you I heard you singing soft and low The songs that mothers always know, And then the pain would seem to go. And sometimes when I waked at night, When all was dark, a single light Would show you sitting by my side And " Mother, Mother dear! " I cried. And you were near until you died. I was a child. I lay abed. God put' His pressure on my head. He sent His pain to question me When all the world was mine to see And I was sad as I could be. I was alone. I longed for you. And sometimes when the sky is blue I seem to see you, seem to know 235 236 BED RIDDEN Your voice forever sweet and low, And dream that 3'ou can never go. And sometimes when the stars at night Sprinkle that river black with light Like stepping stones that cross the sky; I go to meet you, dear. And I Know you are near, until I die. Peconic, 6-5-14 PLAY RITUAL UNDER the trees of the orchard's gray columns and cloisters, upholding Courts of the temple of living, the world has forgotten today. Bulwarked by bastions of green the true treasures of ages unfolding, Safe in the shade of a hedge, her children I hear at their play; And I sit by my window and watch and I listen, a life- time away. Here is a carbon of Pallas. And yonder, Ulysses, her chosen Creeps through his palace at night with Argos the hound at his heels, With him Eumaeus, the swineherd, the son of my cook. Fear has frozen The suitors, Penelope's dolls. The bow twangs. The last of them reels. And the queen at the sight of the slain a rage unrecorded reveals. She is pacified fully with gifts. Brother's coat is a carpet that flying Has haled them in haste to the East where Golconda is grown on the trees. 237 238 PLAY RITUAL And topaz and rubies they rain on her lap. Every skeptic belying The story of Eden they act, in costume convention de- crees With a snake that I gave them last May, made of rubber that squirms when you squeeze. They are Argonauts bound for the ports where Medea mandagora mixes In a smudge that mosquitoes abhor (I can smell the stray fumes of it here). And Aladdin, before they are lost, and the Jinn of the bottle. She fixes Her hair with the comb of the Lorelei. They are every- thing living and dear That the poets and children of time must remember while year follows year. And her soul is the soul of the wind that my baby's bright tresses caresses. And she kisses the lips of her son as they stiffen and sternly command. And her life is the life of the earth that inch of their loveliness presses As they throw themselves down in the shadows too tired and too sleepy to stand. PLAY RITUAL 239 And she calls, and they smile and they see her, in dreams of the heart's shadowland. There the spirits of mothers that played with their babies forever are tender. And the little flushed cheeks in the summer they cool. And they smile with the spring. But saddest and sweetest of all they call through the autumn's wild splendor When our gifts to her altar of light with the months and the minutes we bring; All that playtime and sorrow have sealed to the service of life that is king. S.S. Awa Maru 11-28- 13 MACHINE MADE WIRES and rails and paving stones, bricks and mortar, plaster, glass: We have made a world of them. We have done with trees and grass, Flowers and sunrise and delight, seas and stars and mountain tops. We wind on from day to night, through this treadmill till one drops. We walk other people's ways, trodden hard and hard to tread. We live other people's days, crowded, airless, chill and dead. We hear other people's noise, numbing nerves and heart and mind; Envy other people's joys, unexpected, unresigned : Stare at other people's clothes, furs and feathers, silk and lace; See what other people see, in each blank, machine-made face, Painted, powdered, newly gilt, tailor's dummies for the rest: Watching other's roses wilt, by their passion mad pos- sessed : 240 MACHINE MADE 241 Once a month, or once a year, In some supper room at night, Wasting other people's cheer, stealing other people's light. Turning life to foaming wine and empty bottles. We awake. Reading other people's lies, up to town our task we take. All the old machine-made things we who nothing new devise Do. The soul in us that sings, sighs and sickens, droops and dies. Other people's lusts we live, printed, bound, at second hand. Other people's sins forgive, who their slaves of habit stand. Murders, treasons, tyrannies, maimings, bllndings, brand- ing, all; In our cheap machine-made ease; all things petty, tame and small Manufactured for today, by the million; we retail, Advertise and toss away In a world for rent or sale. Other people's souls we sell, buy or barter for our own. Other people's heaven or hell, doubt or dig. All life alone, 242 MACHINE MADE Out of other people's sight, like our youth long since gone by: Other people's day and night we are drugged with till we die. New York, 7-^7-H THINGS THE EARTH MAN AFTER A STATUE BY LOUIS POTTER WISTFUL, blind, brooding, silent, he stands; All the long strength of earth creeping to light, Holding its substance in huge, heavy hands, Groping a path to the portals of sight. Earth that is slow in him fetters his feet. Rooted in soil like the life of the trees. Brother of mountains, inert, incomplete. Fitted to struggle and grow by degrees; He is the past that to rise is compelled. Pressure of glaciers and lava's slow flow; Brain of the brute from black caverns expelled Into the open, its Maker to know. He is five fingers that stretch till they touch. He is a horror that shudders and hides. He is a need that must grapple and clutch. Vital and sure as the turn of the tides. Sounds beat like hammers, and batter his ears; Surf in its rages, and rivers that run. Roaring of beasts; till above them he hears The song of a bird like the soul of the sun: 245 246 THE EARTH MAN Something that urges him up and afar, Summons his spirit to lust and to hate, Lunge through the shadows to capture a star. Hunt till he holds her, his woman and mate. He is alone though his heart knows it not. Bound by blind hunger of belly and nerves,* Child of the ages that blackness begot; He is Tomorrow whose Master he serves. New York, 1-26-12 AURORA AFTER A STATUE BY LOUIS POTTER SHE is the sunrise of the waking earth, Naked and perfect as a perfect flower, Fearless and poised to meet the light's embrace. For in her eyes a soul has come to birth Fresh from its sleep and fragrant, every hour Of love's delights fore-shadowed in her face. She is the essence of all loveliness. Of every spring time. Every flower and fruit That grew before her gladly to the light Made her immortal. Terror and distress Toiled in the blackness to transmute the brute, To make her beauty wonderful and white. She is the moon's last beam, the gleam of dew That mirrors dawn while shadows shroud the grass, The rose of fire that reddens winter's rime; Radiance of sunsets and of rainbows too, Of all things perfect that appear and pass, Transient and deathless till the end of time. In her all river currents harmonize With rippling pools that eddy round her breasts. And winds that whisper trembling through her hair. And the long lines from shoulders through to thighs 247 248 AURORA Break as the waves break. Into curving crests Around her rise caressing tides of air. She is a symphony, the sum of joy Shaped in one body for the world to see, To learn from her forever to rejoice. She is the smile no sorrow can destroy Warm on the lips of all humanity Waiting to hear the wonder of her voice. New York, i-2g-i2 THE GOLDEN GIRL AFTER A STATUE BY RUDOLPH EVANS FIVE thousand years of sculpture fashioned her; Consummate, simple, modern and as old As Myron's bronzes. All her flesh is gold. She seems to hear her sisters' footsteps stir. Shy dryads gaze at her from old gray trees; Truth in one girl, eternal as today; One man's pure passion that transfused her clay, Turned her to bronze to stand through centuries. She bathes in living sunlight all day long. She feels the wonder of the world. She knows The mysteries of sunsets and of snows. She hears the rapture of the river's song. Around her linger long all tender things; The clouds' slow shadows falling at her feet, The level rays of dawn, the summons sweet Of every winged soul that soars and sings. She listens still until her pilgrims come. Children shall smile to see her loveliness; And mothers meeting her that hour shall bless. Poets shall praise her out of lips long dumb. 249 250 THE GOLDEN GIRL For she is beauty, born today to be The human sister of the stars and snows, The soul of love that smoulders in the rose That one man felt, and gave to all to see. Parts, 4-1-14 ' THE GARGOYLES THEY made a house for holiness, they raised a spire for prayer, With beasts of the Apocalypse around it in the air. The beasts of the Evangelist, man, eagle, lion and ox, They carved upon their pinnacles as nature carved her rocks With fire and frost. And heat and cold, their substance slowly wear. The rains are raised to ravage them. The fingers of the storm Have felt their flesh and found it firm. When all the world is warm, When summer swelters, Paris pants, the Seine is small and old; The fiends rip thunder from the air, and sudden shafts of cold. Like wasps that stab the firmament, the yellow lightnings swarm. The floods are loosed, the thunder rolls, the gutters choke below ; Above, about the pinnacles, the gusts begin to blow. The arrows of the storm have reached the steep cathedral roof. The devils dance. They tread the tiles. They put them to the proof, 251 252 THE GARGOYLES Till the tall columns of the nave shall tremble where they go. And then the gargoyles gurgle loud, through throats that long were dry. Through the hot Tophet of the time that flamed to full July. They saw the sun that filled the sky, that flared high overhead. Below they saw the asphalt ooze. They smelt the fumes of lead. The wind became a blowpipe flame that blustered through the sky. The fiends that perched laid hold on them. And now the dryness drains The water from the living rock, slow drops from granite veins, Till in a thousand thunder claps the airs of heaven ex- plode ; Till the gargoyles glut with gladness like the gutters in the road. And they swim with life that, laughing, takes its pleasure for its pains. The beasts of the Apocalypse, both blessed and accursed. Range round the spire of Notre Dame. The winged man stands first. THE GARGOYLES 253 The eagle, ox and lion there processionals begin; The pelican for charity, the basilisk for sin. But oldest and most grim of all, the gargoyles gray are thirst. Paris, 5-1-^3 THE STONE PILE WE had once seen it on a road to France ; Man barely more than cave man hammering Breaking his stones to fit his iron ring: Deaf to all sounds, to all the winds that sing; Beating the time for manhood's slow advance: Making his stone pile. Vermin breeding there Festered and rotted, dying in the dark. He never knew them, striking spark on spark, Lost seeds of light. He never paused to hark To man's new motors drumming through the air. But once a woman singing went her way. Singing of loves and lullabies to be. He heard her carelessly. He seemed to see Things that belonged to lives more large and free. And then his smile was like the last of day. We have made stone piles in our prison walls. We have made stone piles in our city streets Where life that breeds and festers, life defeats, Where the dull heart of labor blindly beats. Deaf to the winds and all the world that calls: Piling our cities; to an iron ring. Fitting the stuff that binds our road today Lost to the open, vistas far away, 254 THE STONE PILE 255 Valiant adventures, prayers that lovers say, Seeing one woman singing in the spring: Piling our cities; manhood far and near Shaping the stones that larger lives shall tread Beside the road where men that march ahead Call us in vain, who die among the dead Till life, our love at last stands singing here. New York, -6-24-14 FLEET MANCEUFRES THEY keep their intervals as true as seasoned athletes of a team, Trained to the minute. Lean and grim and gray they glide in line ahead. A white wave welters at each bow. And all is stirless overhead Save trails of smoke that from three tall gray funnels fall and landward stream. Like runners breathing tensely through October's stirring air they go. They are as vital and alive; and like the winds they seem to wake, As packed with power that must explode; as imminent as waves that break. And shadows long float on before their long and strong and level row. Essential, cosmic, wonderful, in strange new beauty fit to serve An iron purpose slowly spelled, a living sentence of the law, That wakes the lightnings and the stars; and sterner tensions slowly draw Through the vast void of sound and sense, and tighten every tingling nerve. 256 FLEET MANCEVVRES 257 Man's old dominion over fire, his truceless conquest of the cold, His mastery of storms and tides, his perils long in chart- less seas; His midnight battles with the brute, his wars of all the centuries, Their shifting turrets still conceal, their lips of steel in silence hold. All speaks in thunder when at last the flagship's salvos shake the air. Precise and searching, shot on shot, the target strikes. Her soul set free Like heroes' hearts in battle born, by smoke wreaths haloed splendidly Drifts down the line as ship on ship to God begins its iron prayer. Ship after ship makes offering of discipline and fitness trained To peril's service; ship on ship thunders the law that all obey In war and peace, whose God is strength and larger wisdom day by day. Ship after ship in silence goes to goals that yesterday ordained. 258 FLEET MANCEUFRES 'IVelve steel cathedrals of todaj^ sail trailing incense silently Into the west's horizon red, to sentinel a nation's sleep ; Twelve monasteries stern of men that vigils through the midnight keep; For God, whose cities shame the land, still saves His servants on the sea. Peconicj '/-I2-I^ GLOUCESTER SCHOONERS THEY come shining through the morning like a troop of laughing girls. Under each soaring forefoot the flashing water curls. They have slipped before the sunrise from the shadow- lands of night, And the east is red behind them, and their sails are rose and white. They come from the Banks and the breakers and the meshes blind of mist, Where mermaids in the midnight the sailor's lips have kissed Asleep in his drifting dory. And white hands drag him down. With snows that smooth the surges, and the dreams of men they drown. They come with a toll and a tribute that men from ocean take With the roll of wrecks in winter, and women's hearts that break When they wake in the wild northeasters, and hear on their Gloucester shore The roar of the surf that beaches the bergs on Labrador. They come from the wild sea witches who mortal w^omen hate, 259 26o GLOUCESTER SCHOONERS Who troll the shores for their fishing with the sea bass for their bait. Out of the deep to the shallows, where stirless water hides Rocks that are hooks for their hunger, and the torments white of tides. They come with the blood of the Vikings, boys that have grown through gales. Where death on the crest of the breakers poises his weighted scales. Men who have wrought with the east wind, as a fish is hooked and played. And danced at the dawn with danger and wooed her like a maid. They come on the wrings of the morning like a flock of homing birds. And hearts go out to meet them, and prayers and whispered words. They come like a choir. And their singing and the twang- ing of their stays. Is a lied of the Lord of landfalls, and of storms, and nights and days. Los Angeles, 11-12-IJ THE ROAD GOD who made the mountains and a wall to call us up to Him, made the passes over them and choked their gates with snow, Made His storm winds winnow forth the strong and sure of heart of us, made the cold of starless skies to sift the weak below. Then He sent His rivers forth to pioneer a breach for us. Then He made the trees that should give men fire and heat. Larches, firs and pines, marching up to meet the avalanche, to wrestle with the storm winds, and with winter's white defeat : In their shade by millions made His blossoms, small and sweet. Climbing through the passes come the creatures that pass over them, mountain goats and mountain sheep and mountain cattle lean. Mountain lions, gray ghosts of hunger, stalking stealthily. So they trod their trails all the vales of earth between. So they crossed the glaciers to the summons of the years to be, apes that shedding hair their life's restless road surveyed. Running east and west, from the northern to the southern sea, following the air lanes that the birds of passage made, 261 262 THE ROAD Chased by gulls from rookeries and crags by breakers sprayed. All the ships that sail the sea were launched to serve this road of ours. Rome was built to build it and to pave its ruts with stone. All the tribes that triumphed bore their spoils to swell this load of ours. All the slaves of failure fell and died in dust alone. Dust and rain were turned to mud, that stopped the cracks and chinks of it; so the road was wrested from the wastage of defeat. Dust that red with running blood that renews the earth that drinks of it. And the tribes began to battle on, once more the light to meet. Toward the morning, toward the summit, toward the snow peaks; from the street. Carthage, Tyre and Sidon gave their gold to gain its maintainance; Greece made fair its reaches with her shrines beside the way. White between the olives, till the cross was planted over it, standing at each cross road of the soul that strives with clay. Saracens, Crusaders came and struggled up each mile of it. War wins here its summit, there despair to ruin rolls. THE ROAD 263 Conquerors of centuries grew weary for a while of it. Hannibal, Napoleon, and Caesar paid their tolls, To this road that takes our time, and paves success with souls. Now at last an iron road goes over and goes under it. Men have tunnelled winter and the mountain's heart of stone. Nature stands half tamed today. Men learn to stab and sunder it. But the road still scales the summits where the strongest stand alone. Motor cars and dynamite may make their passing mock of it. The w^eak may seek their tunnels. But the mountains and the cold Lure men from the mob to learn the languor and the shock of it, to wrestle with the storm winds as our fathers fought of old. Till they tramp to the tall portals of the sunset's house of gold. Here we glimpse Valhalla, and the splendor and the sheen of it. And the zig-zags grow more steep. At last they leap from cloud to cloud. Here we hear Valkyries in the twilight. And the lean of it is our tent wall till tomorrow when the winds at dusk are bowed. 264 THE ROAD Worshipping the stars above, our zig-zags to eternity, and men that out of ocean and its slime, inert and dumb, Out of night and ether blind, climbing, come their road to find. The dying lift the living, with their lips and fingers numb. Till death is but one milestone dark to wider worlds to come. Paris, 7-3-13 THE OVERLAND TRAIL IT began In blood of Vikings, far beyond the Alleghenies. North and south along the shore line from the surges of the sea, Through the forests, past the mountains, rose the impulse of a nation. From the farms and from the cities strode its sons whose sires were free, Down the rivers running westward, poled their rafts be- yond the rapids. Out beyond the Mississippi prairie schooners setting sail. Seen like ships along the sky line, met the prairie fires and vanished in the floods of flame, that roaring, swept like rivers past the trail. But the tide of man was stronger. On they swept and passed the prairies, till their starving cattle, failing where the vultures fed, lay dead. Circling round them like the whirlwind, the Cheyennes and Comanches in red spirals of despair, rode on behind them and ahead. Day and night across the prairies, stakes of flame where men and women writhed in torment were their milestones. O'er the ashes of lost lives They wen^ on. And thirst and hunger rode beside them. Fear and fever were their children In the wagons where the smallpox slew their wives. 265 266 THE OVERLAND TRAIL They went on and found the foothills. Where the warders of the mountains raised their mile high wall before them, through the pass their column poured. And they rested by the wayside, where white torrents from the snow-fields foamed through shadows of the hill- sides, in green valleys, blossom floored. Here they halted for a heartbeat of the blood that bore them onward ; got their breath, their gear refitted ; grappled with the great divide. Where the storm winds and the lightnings lashed them back on crumbling ledges, where sheer cliffs that fell forever, walled them in on either side. They went on, and in the desert, death lay waiting, darkly shrouded in the sand storm. And he slew them by his poisoned water holes ; Lured them on with lost mirages. Stripped and maddened they lay dying where he branded them and seared them with the flame that flays men's souls: But the strongest struggled onward, over fields of rotting lava. Giant cacti rose before them like gray ten- tacles of death. They went on and slipped between them, woke once more and saw the mountains; where the trail led to the summit, gazed once more and gathered breath. THE OVERLAND TRAIL 267 They were strong but time was stronger, and he wore them down by inches until winter filled the passes with his wild white ambuscades. Where the blizzard crested mountains, like a seething sea that freezing skyward whirls its spray, were reel- ing; in the welter, up the grades They went on on feet that freezing bled ; and breathlessly and falling, dying, with their broken bodies blazed the trail till others came. And their bones, as white as winter, bare and bleaching in the sunshine, lined the passes, when the summer swept the mountains like a flame. They marched on, beyond the mountains, coastward strid- ing o'er the ranges, till their leaders, in the sunlight, looking westward saw the sea : Till the blood that bore them forward, throbbing onward to the ocean, to the heartbeat of the breakers, labored on, from labor free: Till their strongest on the shore-line felt the trail that they had finished stretching from the far Atlantic with its chain of deathless days. Like a chain of living wampum, red with bloodshed, black with horror, gray with sorrow; in the struggles of their sons should live always. 268 THE OVERLAND TRAIL This they wrought before the railroad, ere the wires were strung that whisper in the darkness through the desert: ere our trail of steel we laid. Like the heartstring of a nation, strong and deathless and enduring, something mightier than millions, in their day our fathers made. In this last great folk migration, westward still the millions striving follow where the old frontiersmen lit their fires and dreamed their dreams. And their spirits, past the prairies, marching on beyond the mountains, trace a trail that runs forever, while one lamp of freedom gleams. Los Angeles, iO-iy-13 THE OLD HOUSE EARTH that loves you, all of you gave her bones to make me strong. Sweating, dust-white quarry men toiled through summer sunlight long. Masons made and rooted me to my hillside. Winter nights Storming legions loosed in vain. Spring brought April's shy delights. Lilacs blossomed in my shade. Autumn stored my cup- boards. So I your fort of life was made; I your school where love should grow. Birds have nested in my trees, summer trysting from the South, Till your fathers learned of life how to love, till heart and mouth Sang their silent ecstasies. Girls their garlands round my walls Round ancestral portraits hung, wreathed my mirrors; heard my calls. All your vigils lone I know. All your hopes and agonies, Every prayer and travail pang. I am heir to all of these. I have borne your children all, echoed laughter light, and tears. 269 270 THE OLD HOUSE Little feet along my shadowed corridors have crept through years ; Climbed my footworn steps. I sent all your strongest forth to fight ; Out of toil and banishment led them home through storm and night; Lent defeat a resting place ; saw the bearers of your dead ; Heard the troubled spirit pass shuddering where horror led. Spirit finger tips I felt tapping at a lighted window pane, When the year's last snow drifts melted ; through the rush of winter rain Watched my masters staggering, blinded by the fumes of sin Thresholds bare and cold defiling. Shrinking famine en- tered in, Where pale women whispering, watched my dying embers fall. I was hungry with their hearts. I have lived and loved it all. Frosts besieged me. One by one winds my outworks whipped away; Till you wandered round the world, came and claimed me yesterday ; THE OLD HOUSE 271 Found my shrine of memories, dreamed of children kneel- ing where Moonlight trembling crept to them; made my grayest gardens fair; - Voice to dusty volumes gave, past my crumbling lintels stole ; Let new fire my hearthstones lave: to my body brought a soul. Shanghai, 1-14-14 ENVOY WE are weak children of a larger day That just begins to dawn. How shall we serve, Strive to leave something when life ebbs aw^ay, Stronger than we were, where light's last reserve Struggles with midnight through each shaking nerve? How shall w^e bring one word that lifts the heart, Reveal one vision of a life divine Boundless as air we breathe, whose wasted art Plays with life's toys behind its battle line? How shall we sound here Heaven's countersign? We have not toiled to lay life's cornerstones, Fashioned of steel its bridges that shall last; Snatched life from death where the sick city groans. We have not sent life's summons speeding fast Through wires that thrill all seas and deserts past. We have not charted stars nor chained the storms; Sorted God's atoms for man's triumph new; Saw how salvation new in test tubes forms; Passed thought's vast armies through today's review^; Marshalled the leaders of that host for you. Yet this remains. We have not played with lies, Traded the truth, despaired nor doubted long; Feared lest man fail at last to scale the skies; 272 ENVOY 273 Who dies today, tomorrow grows more strong, Out of all agonies of pain and wrong. We have known life and found her lovelier Than stars or roses, sunrise, tender eyes; Held in our heart the throbbing heart of her; Out of her storms and flames and battle cries. Caught one new note of truth that never dies. 8-25-14 C 82 89 '*/• • • » . *" ''^ •-'»a!B?,* ^♦^^'^ °.^W** 4.*^"V, * V ^^^..^ ^9 •«s^s^^^« '^^'S ^M^^ HECKMAN BINDERY INC. ^FEB 89 pfflP" N. MANCHESTER ^5^^ INDIANA 46962 ^ v>yA^^\Vij