Page:Canadian poems of the great war.djvu/25

Graves of men, men, men . . . monotonous telling.
O lips that have kissed, now blackened and broken!
O eyes with their light and their laughter frozen!
O fecund flesh that falls asunder!
Deep down under the palpitating soil I see . .
And the sight is fearsome.

Think not, you Sleepers,
That you are sown to corruption only . . .
Husk and core, core and husk, and yet there is something ;
There is life! life! life! life unending:
Blast of cannon and shock of shell, ping of the rifle;
Bodies torn and bones broken at random ;
Flesh and its organs, the whole perfect human machine,
God s work and nature s work up through the eons,
Cycle on cycle from the cell to the cosmos,
Cycles cunningly retraced in the womb of the woman,
Dismembered and scattered; and yet there is something . . . !

O emperors and diplomats and kings,
Politicians and bankers . . . what a sowing !
The flower of the wheat in its feathery seed-time
Is caught on the wave of the wind and carried
To ultimate shores, where kind of its kind engenders:
And you that have ploughed, and planted men. . .
Forget you the harvest?

There will be a springing, a seed-flower in season,
And the wind it listeth its ancient way. . .
Blow wind from the north, from fiord and ice-floe;
Blow wind to the south where the snow flies again;
Take the east and the west, the wide world at your pleasure. . .
And sow! sow! sow!
Sow the seed of the blooming of blood !

I see a Woman sitting by the dyked pool;
Sitting alone by the roadside, outraged, abandoned,