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 The tallest, let us go and strike it down And leave the other two still standing there. I, too, would ask Him to remember me If there were any Paradise beyond this earth that I could see.

Oh! quiet Christ who never knew The poisonous fangs that bite us through And make us do the things we do, See how we suffer and fight and die, How helpless and how low we lie, God holds You, and You hang so high, Though no one looking long at You, Can think You do not suffer too, But, up there, from your still, star-lighted tree What can You know, what can You really see Of this dark ditch, the soul of me!

We are what we are: when I was half a child I could not sit Watching black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burning in the sun, Without paying so heavily for it That joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were almost one. I could hardly bear The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk, The thick, close voice of musk, The jessamine music on the thin night air, Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere— The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scent of my own hair, Oh! there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the high seat Of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat My soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the street. I think my body was my soul, And when we are made thus Who shall control Our hands, our eyes, the wandering passion of our feet, Who shall teach us To thrust the world out of our heart; to say, till perhaps in death, When the race is run,