Page:More songs by the fighting men, soldier poets, second series, 1917.djvu/63

Clifford J. Druce Perhaps beside some lonely copse

A brook would flow with less of ease,

The brooding wind that sways the tops

Murmur more plaintive in the trees.

And should you, lingering there alone,

Feel on your face, some evening

Its touch, that stranger, rarer grown,

Clothes some sweet, straining, half-spoke thing;

Know that the fate self-fixed must yet

Endure, whether I die or live;

And I still strive to ease the debt

Of kisses I was born to give.

, May, 1917.

To a Grave of the Glosters

WOODEN cross above your head,

You lie, your course already sped;

And in this alien plain must rest

The bones and body Cotswold bred.

Not long since, insolent with life

You made the beech-topped barrow rife

With your tumultuous vivid youth,

With other lads, in sport and strife.

59