"Am Kreuzweg wird begraben
Wer selber brachte sich um."
When first the world grew dark to me
I call'd on God, yet came not he.
Whereon, as wearier wax'd my lot,
On Love I call'd, but Love came not.
When a worse evil did befall,
Death, on thee only did I call.
Hark to the echo of Time’s footsteps; gone
Thise moments are into the unseen grave
Of ages. Thy have vanished nameless. None,
While they are deep under the eddying wave
Of the chaotic past, shall placea stone
Sacred to these, the nurses of the brave,
The mighty, and the good. Futurity
Broods on the ocean, hatching ‘neath her wing
Invisible to man the century,
That on its hundered feet, a sluggish thing
Gnawing away the world, shall totter by
And sweep dead mortals with it. As I sing
Early on Christmas Day,
Love, as awake I lay,
And heard the Christmas bells ring sweet and clearly,
My heart stole through the gloom
Into your silent room,
And whispered to your heart, `I love you dearly.'
There, in the dark profound,
Your heart was sleeping sound,
And dreaming some fair dream of summer weather.
At my heart's word it woke,
And, ere the morning broke,
They sang a Christmas carol both together.
Glory to God on high!
Stars of the morning sky,
A COPPER concave of a sky
Hangs high above my head.
Vague thunder sullenly goes by
With dragging, muffled tread.
The hot air faints upon the grass,
And at its bitter breath,
Ten thousand trembling flower-souls pass,
With fragrant sighs, to death.
There comes no breeze. No breeze has sprung
And sweetly blown for days.
Dead air in silent sheets has hung,
Smooth wavering sheets of haze.
The very birds that erstwhile soared
There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,
And never before or again,
When the nights are strong with a darkness long,
And the dark is alive with rain.
Never we know but in sleet and in snow,
The place where the great fires are,
That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth
And the heart of the earth a star.
And at night we win to the ancient inn
Where the child in the frost is furled,
We follow the feet where all souls meet
At the inn at the end of the world.
Now the new chum loaded his three-nought-three,
It's a small-bore gun, but his hopes were big.
"I am fed to the teeth with old ewe," said he,
"And I might be able to shoot a pig."
And he trusted more to his nose than ear
To give him warning when pigs were near.
Out of his lair in the lignum dark.
Where the wild duck nests and the bilbie digs,
With a whoof and a snort and a kind of bark
There rose the father of all the pigs:
And a tiger would have walked wide of him
shot in the eye
shot in the brain
shot in the ass
shot like a flower in the dance
The luminous pages of all story prove
High love hath ending in heroic woe;
Sharp-fanged and fell, dark death doth ever go
In waiting for the wandering feet of love.
And if that fate be shunned, love's footsteps move
Down the dull slope that leads to regions low
Where the thick pulse of ease and wont beats slow
As in some dusk and poppy-haunted grove.
Shall we accept, or shall we not defy,
Entrenched in our fast love, this augury?
Never shall I less than adore thee, Sweet!
With two white roses on her breasts,
White candles at head and feet,
Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;
Lord Death has found her sweet.
Her mother pawned her wedding ring
To lay her out in white;
She'd be so proud she'd dance and sing
to see herself tonight.
From the first it had been like a
Ballad. It had the beat inevitable. It had the blood.
A wildness cut up, and tied in little bunches,
Like the four-line stanzas of the ballads she had never quite
understood--the ballads they had set her to, in school.
Herself: the milk-white maid, the "maid mild"
Of the ballad. Pursued
By the Dark Villain. Rescued by the Fine Prince.
The Happiness-Ever-After.
That was worth anything.
It was good to be a "maid mild."
That made the breath go fast.
