Page:Battle-retrospect, and other poems - Wilder - 1923.djvu/23

 Now as your laggard wraiths are blown

Vista on vista of the blasted zone

Is momently revealed,

Vision on vision of the visitation.

The invisible flame of famine, fiercely fanned,

Consumes the land.

Starvation

Feeds on all flesh, a spirit-conflagration,

Leaving the human stubble charred on every hand.

Far as the eye can see outside the village bounds

The dead lie heaped in mounds

Awaiting burial like the slaughtered hordes

Upon some vaster battle-field.

The refuse wagons make their daily rounds;

The bodies rattle on the boards,—

Young forms yet apt for living's hurtless strife,

Lithe weapons still for eager souls to wield,

And children's bodies swift to play,

Still unworn vestures strangers to decay;

Stiff as curved fish beneath the unregarded sun,

Copies of God, obscene as carrion.

The steppes are littered with the unnumbered slain

As though great nature by some hideous birth,

Some foul abortion,

Had piled the earth

With countless still-born progeny,

By some untoward miscarriage suddenly

Heaped dead in life's domain,

Blasted with malformation and distortion.

Or as if in the sun

Hell had disgorged its bloodless multitude

And, dreaming the Millennium begun,

The tombs of time cast up their dead too soon,

Fleshed but unquickened,

Only to swoon, 17