Page:Fifes and Drums, Poems of America at War, Vigilantes, 1917.djvu/77

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AMERICA IN ARMS

We have not willed this war,
    Nor heaped for man this monstrous pyre,
But we have sought on hell's wide shore
    To quench the awful fire.

This war was willed to be
    By one who sprang on a world asleep,
And now his talons out of the sea
    Have drawn us in to the deep:

In to the deep and the dark
    Where his blood is drunk with the splendor of ships,
As he lies in lair with a steel-gray shark—
    The mad foam on his lips.

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