Page:Battle-retrospect, and other poems - Wilder - 1923.djvu/61

 "IN HIM WE LIVE."

fathoms deep our life is plunged

In an exceeding plenitude of grace,

Its folly and its wretchedness expunged,

Its pity hallowed in Love's vast embrace.

Compassion like a flooding river brims

Along the canyon of the squalid street

Ample to lave and heal; and glory rims

The city skyline where dim pinions beat;

And pity like a tide engulfs the foes

Working each other havoc in the fray,

At worst the folly of children unto those

To whom a thousand years is as a day.

Transfixed with grief, the amazement of a god,

Love stares in stupor at the holocaust

Of famine, where upon the frozen sod

A marred lot from the potter's wheel is tossed;

Divining though a million lives are scrapped

And flung to rot like carrion on the plain,

Yet human life is islanded and lapped

In tides of quiet that transcend all pain.

Love, that fanatic treasurer of hearts

Who prizes our beloved past our conceit,

Though circumstance converge on them his darts,

Shall shield their spirits in his close retreat.

There is a tenderness that bathes the world,

A peace that shelters terror in its skirt

And where the blind world's thunderbolts are hurled,

Guards lest one hair of these dear heads be hurt.

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