Page:Battle-retrospect, and other poems - Wilder - 1923.djvu/19

 Why still increase the overwhelming odds

Against us—add this self-inflicted curse—

That we should hunt each other in the path

Of cataclysm, stay to vent our wrath

One on the other in the middle-way

Of swift annihilation, tear and slay

Beneath the onslaught of the universe,

Wage civil war, our seats stormed by the gods?

E'en the wild beasts forego their lust for blood,

Fleeing in panic through a blazing wood....

Mysterious is the lot of common lives

Lost in the mass,

Anonymous as leaves or blades of grass

In the thick verdure of humanity,

And inexistent to the powers that be:

Such were these all;

And so like leaves they fall,

Or one by one,

Or, when some storm of retribution drives

Over the face of mankind at the call

Of surcharged passions,

Unnumbered from their humble holdings wrenched,

Before the blast they run,

Creatures of life's blind impulse and its altering fashions,

To the deep drifts of still oblivion;

Save where their thought survives

In that sequestered spot where they were known,

In some frail fort of love 'gainst death and time entrenched.

Even their vices were not all their own,

Inevitably sown

In childhood's hospitable tilth

By the thick-flying seed

Of man's continuing legacy of ill,

His cherished heirlooms of disease and filth,

And rank depravities of ancient date,

And unimpaired inheritance of hate, 13