Page:Poems of the Great War - Cunliffe.djvu/198

 172 JAMES MACKERETH

��TO ENGLAND, OUR MOTHER

A HYMN OF LOYALTY

We are your children, O Mother,

And tried by your testing, but true ; Sealed of your sign and none other ;

Soul of the soul that is you ; Yours from the past, for the morrow ;

Leal at your travail we bow, Mother made perfect by sorrow,

With the pain-splendid brow.

Yours was our freedom that blamed you,

Our right that was wind to our hate Yours, and the swift wrath that named you.

Mother, we love, -7- and we wait. We that you favored or slighted,

Mother, are all of us peers In our will that your wrong shall be righted,

In our love at the sight of your tears.

Ah, deep in our hearts is the sweetness Of your fields where as infants we trod,

When our ills were as swallows for fleetness. In the green-curtained play-grounds of God.

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