Poems
Chandler, E. W. & Maynard, Theodore & Paulding, Gouverneur & Blake, Marie & Kramer, Edgar Daniel & Strahan, Speer & Alling, Kenneth Slade & Lewis, May
December 99, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 215 POEMS arie Bash irtseff Gods A pulse fantastic, careless, absent-minded, A flurry of expense and then Mont Dore: The cup is full--linoleum on the floor....
...Yet what would make it worse would be the thought Of someone absent: so, with the Princess Lise She talked of islands in the northern seas, Fjords and the late clear winter light--they caught For a moment the silence where nothing stirs Save a contemplative wind in the taller firs...
...E. W. CHANDLER...
...Plunder When you are in your grave forgotten, Then ladies, not yet born, may wear Your cloak of silver, and your jewels Around their throats and in their hair...
...KEN~rETH SLOE ALLINO...
...Religious House Staid up with blossoms in the dawn you stand As one with rich myrrh dripping from her fingers, In grey wet fields, white orchards at either hand, And wood doves calling where the spring rain lingers, Bearing here in these country roads apart The Heart of wounded Love within your heart...
...If the mountains could, a moment, he reminded They are volcanic and make a new Pompeii--Meanwhile post-cards, meanwhile the daily walk, The papers, the shops of souvenirs, the talk Of diets---and the same thing every day...
...But somehow battles with the dead have been Not always vague in value and this shape, Confronted now with armies sovereign In power, is inconsiderate of escape, But, with the steel for shadows sharpened, rises And runs to meet the living gods' devices...
...For a while I could walk gaily, Many a mile...
...Pk nunciation I've uprooted beauty And left an ugly scar...
...9 firacle How does so frail a music as your voice Persist across the thunder of the years, Shatter the sullen walls of apathy, And laugh above old threnodies of tears...
...OUVERNEUR PAULDING...
...To sharpen steel for shadows was the poor And pitiable labor of that day...
...Protest He was far too young to die-- Oh, the wailing and the weeping...
...And I have known in fall your garden ways, Yellow leaves trembling to earth, while grave bees Bore their late honies home, and on those days Wild dreams came on me 'neath your orchard trees, Knowing One lives in you, who His saints have said, Bears wounds more red than is the apple red...
...December 99, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 215 POEMS arie Bash irtseff Gods A pulse fantastic, careless, absent-minded, A flurry of expense and then Mont Dore: The cup is full--linoleum on the floor...
...As I, with sacrilegious fingers, Can loot the coffers of the dead, And steal a rose that bloomed in Eden To glow again upon your head-So other lovers will not scruple To search your coffers through and through, And steal my songs for other ladies--- And hardly give a thought to you...
...SPEER STRAHAN...
...And wearily beset with phantoms, plods My youth and in his mouth the mouldy taste Of mangled ghosts...
...Come, Time, come and mend it, Shape it like a star...
...For silver-sweet and haunting as a sigh Its melody along my life is blown, Still ravishing, insistent, hungered for: The loveliest sound my ears have ever known...
...And yet I heard his pale lips sigh, "Your agony but breaks my sleeping...
...Out to the gate Seems far to go...
...THEODORE MAYrCAVa...
...EDOAR DANIEL KRAMER...
...MAY LEWIS...
...Unprofitable war That found no spoils at all to fetch away...
...e und0wn I thought you loved me...
...The years I spent in struggle with dead gods, When there were living gods to fight, are waste...
...But now I fear It is not so...
...MARIE BLAKE...
Vol. 5 • December 1926 • No. 8
