Page:A channel passage and other poems (IA channelpassageot00swinrich).pdf/65

From the blood-sodden soil that was blasted with fires of
the Church and her creed
Sprang rarely but surely, by grace of thy spirit, a flower
for a weed.
Thy spirit, unfelt of thy priests who blasphemed thee,
enthralled and enticed
To deathward a child that was even as the child we
behold in Christ.
The Moors, they told her, beyond bright Spain and the
strait brief sea,
Dwelt blind in the light that for them was as darkness,
and knew not thee.
But the blood of the martyrs whose mission was witness
for God, they said,
Might raise to redemption the souls that were here, in the
sun's sight, dead.
And the child rose up in the night, when the stars were
as friends that smiled,
And sought her brother, and wakened the younger and
tenderer child.