I sing of peace. Was it but yesterday
I came among your roses and your corn?
Then momently amid this wrath I pray
For yesterday reborn.
CHRISTMAS: 1915
NOW is the midnight of the nations: dark
Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas,
Earth, like a mother in birth agonies,
Screams in her travail, and the planets hark
Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark,
Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees
Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades,
Wrenching the night's imponderable arc.
Christ! What shall be delivered to the morn
Out of these pangs, if ever indeed another
Morn shall succeed this night, or this vast mother
Survive to know the blood-spent offspring, torn
From her racked flesh?—What splendour from the smother?
What new-wing'd world, or mangled god still-born?
THE PEACEFUL WARRIOR
THERE is no joy in strife,
Peace is my great desire;
Yet God forbid I lose my life
Through fear to face the fire.
A peaceful man must fight
For that which peace demands,—
Freedom and faith, honour and right,
Defend with heart and hands.
