Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/316

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And when our griefs have passed on gloomy wing,

When friend and foe are sped,

Sons of a morning to be born shall sing

The radiant Cross of Red;

Sons of a morning to be born shall sing

The radiant Cross of Red.

Eden Phillpotts

THE HEALERS

N a vision of the night I saw them,

In the battles of the night.

'Mid the roar and the reeling shadows of blood

They were moving like light,

Light of the reason, guarded

Tense within the will,

As a lantern under a tossing of boughs

Burns steady and still.

With scrutiny calm, and with fingers

Patient as swift

They bind up the hurts and the pain-writhen

Bodies uplift,

Untired and defenceless; around them

With shrieks in its breath

Bursts stark from the terrible horizon

Impersonal death;

But they take not their courage from anger

That blinds the hot being;

They take not their pity from weakness;

Tender, yet seeing;

Feeling, yet nerved to the uttermost;

Keen, like steel;

Yet the wounds of the mind they are stricken with,

Who shall heal?