Page:Armistice Day.djvu/265

Rh And when the enemy ravaged her bright blossoms,

Drenched her with their rich blood

To prove she lived and was the ever-living.

These are the true Immortals,

The deathless ones that saved the world.

Nay, weep, if weep thou must

And think upon thy lad, onetime in trust

To fortune; of his gallant golden head

And all the wayward sanctities of childhood;

Of how he crowned thy life with confidences;

Of the odor of his body, lulled with sleep,

Confusing thy dim prayers for some best future

With the sheer love that is the deepest:

False fortune has destroyed her hostages!

Old joys are bitter, bitter as very death!

Let break thy heart and so be comforted.

Be comforted, for we have claimed the child

And taken him to be with light and glory;

Not as we knew him in his earthly days

The lovely one, the virtuous, the dauntless,—

Or one who was a boaster, thick with faults

Perchance,—but as the index of the time,

The stay and nurture of the world's best hope,

The peerless seed of valor and victory.

Here in a realm beyond the fading world,

We garner them and hold them in abeyance