The form I watched soared forward, spun the curve.
"By God, you've missed!"
The Marshal shook his head.
No, there he lay, face downward in the road.
"I reckon he was dead
Before he hit the ground,"
The Marshal said.
"Just once, at fifty feet,
A moving target too.
That's just about as good
As any man could do!
A little tough;
But, since he ran,
I call it fair enough."
He mopped his head, and started down the road.
The silence eddied round him, turned and flowed
Slowly back and pressed against the ears.
Until unnumbered flies set it to droning,
And, down the heat, I heard a woman moaning.
D.H.
[7] "Contemporary Verse," prize poem for 1921.
ECLIPSE
Once melodies of street-cries washed these walls,
Glad as the refluent song
Of cheerful waters from a happy spring
That shout their way along;
Such cries were born in other days from lips
A spirit taught to sing. Now it is gone!
Memory expects those hymns for shrimp and prawn,
Or the mellifluous chaunt from the black gorge
Of Orpheus inside a murky skin,
Who looked the gold sun in the eye
While garden mists grew thin,
And intoned "Hoppin' John!"