The Last Day (verse)
Sargent, Daniel
The Last Day Now, skulls, rise from the hills, your hour is come. Clavicles, digits, shin-bones, vertebrae. And as a drummer-boy resumes his drum Take up again your hearts familiarly. Stand up...
...In the skies A light is coming...
...You can't say what...
...Rise from the graveyards green, from oceans blue...
...They have no banners...
...Some weep a tear That turns the cheek to chalk...
...They all are chained...
...Mankind at last is marshaled to discipline...
...their tears are joy...
...But all of it has suffered a sea-change...
...Somehow a charm is lost...
...Some weep...
...No ankle-bone is moved...
...Put on your strength of tendons...
...DANIEL SARGENT.NIEL SARGENT...
...Stand up, ye bones...
...Your heaven is overhead...
...You know it from its roof down to its rut...
...No one stirs...
...It now will take reflection from the sky...
...This battle-front is solid...
...The world you find will never strike you strange...
...Here is the battle lost, or the battle gained...
...Our bones stand now like an army on review...
...What are they going to win ? In usual war those who are cowards flee- Unless machine-guns whip them from behind- Those who are brave go on courageously And win the war and then fall out of mind...
...Here is the last fight of all warriors...
...No battle-dread To their most terrible terror ere came near...
...Rise out of hills, rise out of fields, rise from Marshes and garden plots where no one knew Anyone could be crouching in a tomb...
...I wonder where this army is marching to...
...What victory is this...
...Put on that armor white you knew so well Which though as soft as leather stood you by In life's brief tournament until you fell...
...You must be valorous...
...That mighty bulk, the huge department store Shines with its lights still brilliant, like a ship Ready to sink beneath the ocean floor And drown its myriad eyes on its last trip...
...Ten thousand miles of trains and trolley-cars Stand in their tracks as if an armistice- An armistice that really ends all wars- Had just arrived...
...Stand up like men, you rib-cases, you thighs, Leap to your sockets, hip and humerus...
Vol. 11 • February 1930 • No. 15
