Volume Ii Part 34 (2/2)
I hear, I would the City heard.
The City of the smoky fray; A prodded ox, it drags and moans: Its Morrow no man's child; its Day A vulture's morsel beaked to bones.
It strives without a mark for strife; It feasts beside a famished host: The loose restraint of wanton life, That threatened penance in the ghost!
Yet there our battle urges; there Spring heroes many: issuing thence, Names that should leave no vacant air For fresh delight in confidence.
Life was to them the bag of grain, And Death the weedy harrow's tooth.
Those warriors of the sighting brain Give worn Humanity new youth.
Our song and star are they to lead The tidal mult.i.tude and blind From b.e.s.t.i.a.l to the higher breed By fighting souls of love divined,
They scorned the ventral dream of peace, Unknown in nature. This they knew: That life begets with fair increase Beyond the flesh, if life be true.
Just reason based on valiant blood, The instinct bred afield would match To pipe thereof a swelling flood, Were men of Earth made wise in watch.
Though now the numbers count as drops An urn might bear, they father Time.
She shapes anew her dusty crops; Her quick in their own likeness climb.
Of their own force do they create; They climb to light, in her their root.
Your brutish cry at m.u.f.fled fate She smites with pangs of worse than brute.
She, judged of shrinking nerves, appears A Mother whom no cry can melt; But read her past desires and fears, The letters on her breast are spelt.
A slayer, yea, as when she pressed Her savage to the slaughter-heaps, To sacrifice she prompts her best: She reaps them as the sower reaps.
But read her thought to speed the race, And stars rush forth of blackest night: You chill not at a cold embrace To come, nor dread a dubious might.
Her double visage, double voice, In oneness rise to quench the doubt.
This breath, her gift, has only choice Of service, breathe we in or out.
Since Pain and Pleasure on each hand Led our wild steps from slimy rock To yonder sweeps of gardenland, We breathe but to be sword or block.
The sighting brain her good decree Accepts; obeys those guides, in faith, By reason hourly fed, that she, To some the clod, to some the wraith,
Is more, no mask; a flame, a stream.
Flame, stream, are we, in mid career From torrent source, delirious dream, To heaven-reflecting currents clear.
And why the sons of Strength have been Her cherished offspring ever; how The Spirit served by her is seen Through Law; perusing love will show.
Love born of knowledge, love that gains Vitality as Earth it mates, The meaning of the Pleasures, Pains, The Life, the Death, illuminates.
For love we Earth, then serve we all; Her mystic secret then is ours: We fall, or view our treasures fall, Unclouded, as beholds her flowers
Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire.
<script>