Page:Canadian poems of the great war.djvu/25

 Grace Blackburn

Graves of men, men, men. . . monotonous telling.

O lips that have kissed, now blackened and broken !

O eyes with their light and their laughter frozen !

O fecund flesh that falls asunder !

Deep down under the palpitating soil I see. .

And the sight is fearsome.

Think not, you Sleepers,

That you are sown to corruption only. . . Husk and core, core and husk, and yet there is some thing ;

There is life! life! life! life unending: Blast of cannon and shock of shell, ping of the rifle ; Bodies torn and bones broken at random ; Flesh and its organs, the whole perfect human machine, God s work and nature s work up through the eons, Cycle on cycle from the cell to the cosmos, Cycles cunningly retraced in the womb of the woman, Dismembered and scattered ; and yet there is some thing. . . !

emperors and diplomats and kings, Politicians and bankers. . . what a sowing ! The flower of the wheat in its feathery seed-time Is caught on the wave of the wind and carried

To ultimate shores, where kind of its kind engenders : And you that have ploughed, and planted men. . . Forget you the harvest?

There will be a springing, a seed-flower in season, And the wind it listeth its ancient way. . . Blow wind from the north, from fiord and ice-floe; Blow wind to the south where the snow flies again; Take the east and the west, the wide world at your

pleasure. . . And sow ! sow ! sow ! Sow the seed of the blooming of blood !

1 see a Woman sitting by the dyked pool ; Sitting alone by the roadside, outraged, abandoned,

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