Never the hungry world,
The desperate childish world,
The feeble stupid world,
Caught in its horrible webs,
Of stupid desires and needs,
Of pamperings and sloth,
Of pride and avarice,
Of class and snobbery;
Never the world can be saved
Until we look on this.
He reaches over, seizes the cross and embraces it, passionately continuing between moans:
In the trenches they say it,
In the hospitals know it.
Men have talked to each other,
Lying sobbing with pain
Under the misery
Of stabbing knives of cold.
Out under the stars,
Where the broken bodies lie
Of young men scattered stiff
In terrible postures of death;
Or sweet boys broken up
In ghastly pieces of death.
The broken whispers sob:
The body and blood of Christ.
“The body and blood of Christ,”
It has been broken again,
By all the simple people
The patient humble people;
A long communion table,
Stretching out through all lands.
The body and blood of Christ,
Given to us again
By these his ignorant men,
Who when they crashed to death
On mountain or on plain
Resigned their souls to Him.
The Bersagliere raises his arm to heaven as if registering a vow:
Nevermore will I take
The holy sacrament
But that my lips will say,
The bodies and blood of men,
Never will I receive
The wafer on my lips
But after Christ’s sweet name,
“Bodies and blood of men!”
Bitter will be the wine
Unless I murmur soft
“The bodies and blood of men
Who die, that He might live.”
Woodcarver regarding the stricken soldier. Ah! what does this chaos mean?
The American bites his lips and clenches his hand. Finally he turns to where the cross lies on the table, takes it up reverently and curiously, and looks at it as at some new thing.
The American, reverently:
It means, a new-raised cross;
The simple things Christ knew,
And a Christ that has not died.
It means a new found self,
And a Soul that trusts itself.
It means a Mind that sees
Beyond race boundaries,
Beyond all Separates
Of race or land or kin;
One People that shall rise
Throughout the nationed globe,
And speak one solemn word
With all their various tongues,
There shall be no more War!
One People shall demand,
For the children still to be,
That Self shall be consumed
In the Passion No more War.
One Science dedicate
To a solemn World-emprise,
Spreading immortal health
Over the whole of life;
That engines be dedicate
To the good and help of the world;
That crops be dedicate
To the strength and life of the world;
That gold be dedicate
To the power and might of the world;
That Mind be dedicate
To the reverent Law of the World.
They all regard him in wonder, until the Woodcarver demands,—