The Morning Paper
Carnage!
Humanity disgraced!
Time's dearest toil effaced!
Poison gases and flame
Putting Nero to shame!
Bayonet, bomb and shell!
Merry reading for hell!
The wickedness! the waste!
Courage!
To gain their fiery goal,
Some crumbling, blood-soaked knoll,
How fearlessly they fling
Their flesh to suffering,
Offer their ardent breath
To gasping, shuddering death!
O miracle of soul!
poem by Katharine Lee Bates
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The Sunset, Woven Of Soft Lights
THE sunset, woven of soft lights
And tender colors, lingers late,
As looking back on all day's dreary plights,
Compassionate;
— The foolish day of hopes so high,
Who counts her hours by blunders now,
Yet wears at last this jewel-crown of sky
Upon her brow.
Out to eternity she goes,
Not for her failure scorned, but see!
Our poor day flushed with beauty, one more rose
On God's rose-tree.
poem by Katharine Lee Bates
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Mist
ON the mountain side they fashion,
Those rifting shreds of storm,
A figure of strange passion,
A winged and sworded form.
Majestic, wild, colossal,
With angry arm thrown high;
Those swaying shoulders jostle
The glory from the sky.
Then flows the happy hour.
That tyrant of the mist
Turns to a wavering tower
And melts in amethyst,
Foretelling thus the cycle
— O speed it, Holy Dove!—
When the Archangel Michael
Shall vanish into Love.
poem by Katharine Lee Bates
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War Profits
THE horns of the moon are tipped
With pearl. Her lover, wooed
By charms and won, Endymion,
Inherits quietude.
White the gleam
Of the dream
On his eyes.
The horns of the sun are dipt
In ruddy flame that flings
Adventurous young Icarus
To earth on ruined wings.
But he flew,
But he knew
Winds and skies.
Lucifer's horns have a crust
Of gold and topaz gem
On points that thrust to yellow dust
The heart that covets them.
Heed! take heed!
For by greed
[...] Read more
poem by Katharine Lee Bates
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Man Overboard
YOUNG, the naked stoker who went
Mad with the fires and leapt to the sea,
Boyhood still in the voice that sent
One shrill cry back from eternity.
Perchance from the phosphorescent gleams
That shot through our wake of swirling foam,
On his delirious brain flashed dreams
Of a waiting mother, an English home.
The ocean clad him in cool, soft robe;
The ship fled on, as the guilty flee;
And the sun, a crimson-belted globe,
Slipped down to comfort him under the sea.
poem by Katharine Lee Bates
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Apollo Laughs
'APOLLO laughs,' the proverb tells,
Far echo of old oracles,
A Delphic waif, —'Once in the year,
Apollo laughs.' O laughter clear
As sunshine, blithe as golden bells!
What mortal folly parallels
Olympian jest and so impels
To mirth till Heaven's bright charioteer,
Apollo, laughs?
'Tis when the annual critic knells
The death of poetry, while swells
Some faint, fresh wood-note, pioneer
Of music earth shall thrill to hear.
Then at Apollo's infidels
Apollo laughs.
poem by Katharine Lee Bates
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When Cap'n Tom Comes Home
WHEN Cap'n Tom comes home, and his sea chest
Is opened, oh, the shells that rainbow foam
Tossed on far shores, by us to be possessed
When Cap'n Tom comes home!
Cocoanuts for which gray, chattering monkeys clomb;
Tamarinds, and dates, and luscious sweetmeats pressed
Into blue jars of quaint pagoda dome!
Canaries, corals, shimmering shawls and, best
Of all, keepsakes that on wild seas a-roam
He carved from whale's tooth for a village blest
When Cap'n Tom comes home!
poem by Katharine Lee Bates
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If You Could Come
My love, my love, if you could come once more
From your high place,
I would not question you for heavenly lore,
But, silent, take the comfort of your face.
I would not ask you if those golden spheres
In love rejoice,
If only our stained star hath sin and tears,
But fill my famished hearing with your voice.
One touch of you were worth a thousand creeds.
My wound is numb
Through toil-pressed, but all night long it bleeds
In aching dreams, and still you cannot come.
poem by Katharine Lee Bates
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In A Northern Wood
FRAGRANT are the cedar-boughs stretching green and level,
Feasting-halls where waxwings flit at their spicy revel,
But O the pine, the questing pine, that flings its arms on high
To search the secret of the sun and escalade the sky!
Rueful hemlocks, gaunt and old, with boughs a-droop, despairing,
Clutch for touch of mother-earth; the while the pine is daring
To rock the stars amid its cones and lull them with its croon,
And snare the silver eagle that is nested in the moon.
poem by Katharine Lee Bates
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Great Twin Brethren, The
The battle will not cease
Till once again on those white steeds ye ride,
O heaven-descended Twins,
Before humanity's bewildered host.
Our javelins
Fly wide,
And idle is our cannon's boast.
Lead us, triumphant Brethren, Love and Peace.
A fairer Golden Fleece
Our more adventurous Argo fain would seek,
But save, O Sons of Jove,
Your blended light go with us, vain employ
It were to rove
This bleak,
Blind waste. To unimagined joy
Guide us, immortal Brethren, Love and Peace.
poem by Katharine Lee Bates
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