Page:Armistice Day.djvu/132

110 PEACE AT MORNING

BY DANA BURNET

I

at the touch of morning: and the City is shaken with a Song!

Not rapture smoothed and rhythmed, but the wild peal of horns, gongs, whistles, bells and drum-beats,

Making a strange concordance on the air!

Bass-notes of guns and ecstasy of bells—

Bells above all,

Bells bright as water tumbling down a chasm,

Bells like the lost chime of the hammers of Babel!

Bells tracing arabesques of laughter on the discord of the dawn!

I hear a voice in the shadow crying:

"They have signed the armistice; the war is done."

And I lean from my window and see the crowds surging below me, with white hands thrust up as though to shake a music from the stars!

Women with vivid faces, marching, singing,

Dark men of labor, carrying burnished little pails,