Page:Battle-retrospect, and other poems - Wilder - 1923.djvu/22

 THE VISION OF THE RUSSIAN FAMINE.

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vast areas of the night-ringed lists

And hiving tracts of life

Where death and birth,

Moving like storms upon a leafy wilderness,

Wage their perennial strife,

I see your wraiths drift heavenward like mists

That suck from earth

When the slant streamers of the sun caress

The frosted furrows and the steaming marshes,

And phantom phalanxes evolve on stealthy marches.

I see your wraiths drift heavenward like smoke

That swirls aloft

In ashen whorls

And tortuous trunks of vapour like the twisted oak,

And writhing torsos of pale flame,

As oft

When conflagration that no craft can tame

And running prairie-fires past control

Consume whole provinces and char a countryside;

Far and wide

The floating scrolls unroll

And swaying curtains lazily unfurl,

And o'er the blackened belt the drifting palls abide.

I see your wraiths tower up in dizzy rush.

So, when the tempests shroud

The heavens and the hurricane is loud

And ocean shouts

Between the silence of the depths and the sidereal hush,

The whirling pillars of the water-spouts

By harrying currents chased

Lift from the rolling waste

In traveling vortices that feed the clouds.

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