The hymns we sing must be the song of spheres,
The prayers we pray be truths of stone and star;
We want no sacrifice of sinner’s tears,
We want to rise above this clay we are.
Our war machines, do they not teach the thing
Your maxims never taught us ...? Ah, we flee
To the Waste Places in our sorrowing....
Show us the power of true divinity!
Look now around you, free your too-white hands;
Comfort these hearts that burn. What must we do?
We have no Paul, no Moses, only you.
Then help us to be honest. From all lands,
Priests! Men! Arise! Acclaim! The new bread give;
The Bread by which we shall not die, but live!
PROTAGONIST.
The fight was unequal, bitter and always new,
I saw how my enemy gained on me and how he drew
My strength, my youth, my soul from my shivering frame;
Yet have I not been beaten—I faced him whenever he came.
When he stabbed I watched how he did it—Poison, I studied the cup,
Flayed me with whips, I girded the bleedings up;
Hunger, imprisonment—all these I wrote in my book;
I have learned all the enemy’s purpose, I know every look.
I have conned every gesture and gotten by heart all his guile,
Yet still comes the fear and the watchfulness under my smile;
For hard as I struggle to outwit his plot to betray me,
He holds that utterest thing that can utterly slay me—
Still do I turn and defy the face of him creeping;
“Now that I know thee, thou Life, thou art locked in my keeping;
Dungeoned, thou Horror, in creative cells of desire,
Ringed in the widening rings of my aspirate fire—
I, your Creator, by steady implacable strife,
Shall give men and women a lovelier thing to call ‘Life.’”
SIGNAL FIRES.
Everywhere we have sought Thee—questioned, wondered,
Everywhere marked Thy beauty and Thine hour;
Now if at last no sacrifice is brought Thee,
Dost Thou believe we doubt Thine awful Power?
Nay, we have loved, have striven, have served, obeyed Thee,
Gloried in beauty of Thine, uttered Thy love;
Given long vigils to attain and mind Thee,
Spent lives in fixing Thee below, above.
Still dost withhold Thee, canst ignore this wonder
Of men who seek Thee in the manner Thou knowest—?
Humble and longing, ignorant, who blunder,
Yet loyal to Thy will and where Thou goest?
We will not cowardly say Thou hast no feeling,
Will not believe Thou hidest back of the years;
Or hast no Word for rapturous revealing—
Art dumb like us; like us, art veiled in tears.
No. We believe; but now we work nor tire
Stirring the embers of the Cosmic Night;
Thou art the Source, we build our answering fire;
God of our Godhood, answer our Beacon Light!