For H. L.
Men have marred thee, O Mother:
Autumn hath now no tawny and gilded leaves;
Nor murmuring among sleepy boughs;
But stark and writhen as a woman ravished,
With twisted tortured limbs,
Are Mametz’ woods.
Hath not thy child, Persephone, tall men,
Yea, even all the children of the earth,
Bringing her tribute?
But the reapers sing not in thy wheatfields:
Tall sheaves wait ungarnered,
Though swallows are shrilling in the skies.
We are reaped, who were thy reapers, and slain our songs;
We are torn as Iason, beloved of thee, Mother:
Heavy the clay upon our lips,
The gray rats fear us not, but pass quickly, sated,
Over prone trunks, rent limbs, dead faces,
That are ashen under the moon.
Love, who begat us, shall Love slay us utterly?
Shall we not mingle with earth, as with sleep,
Dream into grasses, leafage, flowers,
Such being our very flesh; and shudder
In the glitter of thin shivering poplars,
That tremble like slim girls shaken
At a caress,
Bowed in a clear, keen wind?
Lo, in us the glory of a new being,
A wonder, a terror, an exultation,
Even in the filth of our shambles,
Loosened as lightnings upon us, devouring us;
Till we be but a shaken wrath of flames,
A many-tongued music of thunder,
Beyond the thunder of guns.
And we fail beneath it,
Sink into our ashes, cower as dogs;
While the glory of many shaken flames
Drowns in the gray of thy dawns,
That reveal unto us
Earth wasted and riven with iron and fire.
Desolate!
Thou hast turned from us....
Even so thou art lovely,
As a woman grown old in sorrows,
With patient kindly eyes,
From whom hath passed the shadow of desire;
And her ears keep the whispers of many lovers,
As things heard in sleep.
But thou heed’st not our prayers, our strivings,
The moans of our anguish,
Our mute agonies;
Though thy loins bare us in travail,
Though thou art the bride of our desiring,
Yea, and the child of our desire,
In triple deity;
Knowing things past, and things to come, when both
Meet on the instant, rounding to a who
This intense keen edge of flame
Consuming our poor dust.
Sit’st thou thus wisely silent,
With subtile and inviolate eyes,
Knowing us but the shadow of thy substance,
As transitory as the leaves?
Wiselier even....
Knowing us from the matter of our lives:
Not the sweet leaves the wind stirs,
But the wind,
Whose passage the leaves shadoweth.
There are no leaves now in thy woods, Mametz.