Page:Darkwater (Du Bois 1920).djvu/204

190 For the tripping of your feet

Make a mystic music sweet

In the darkness of your hair;

Light and laughter in the air—

Little children weeping there,

God shall find your faces fair!"

I strode above the stricken, bleeding men,

The rampart 'ranged against the skies,

And shouted:

"Up, I say, build and slay;

Fight face foremost, force a way,

Unloose, unfetter, and unbind;

Be men and free!"

Dumbly they shrank,

Muttering they pointed toward that peak,

Than vastness vaster,

Whereon a darkness brooded,

"Who shall look and live," they sighed;

And I sensed

The folding and unfolding of almighty wings.

Yet did we build of iron, bricks, and blood;

We built a day, a year, a thousand years,

Blood was the mortar,—blood and tears,

And, ah, the Thing, the Thing of wings,

The wingéd, folding Wing of Things

Did furnish much mad mortar

For that tower.

Slow and ever slower rose the towering task,

And with it rose the sun,

Until at last on one wild day,

Wind-whirled, cloud-swept and terrible

I stood beneath the burning shadow

Of the peak,