A CHILD and an old Italian
Who carves his dreams in wood
And “is not much afraid,”
All that is left in Venice,
To stay and guard the doves.
The child regarding the war correspondent curiously:
Stranger, why do you come?
Venice is ugly now;
The strangers come no more—
Only the officers come
With charts and clanging boots;
Their talk is swift and stern,
Their eyes are burned like yours,
And no-one ever smiles.
Signori used to come;
My father rowed them around;
They laughed and sang and threw
Money in the canal,
As the Doges once threw rings.
The kind merry strangers!
They loved the bobbing lanterns,
The songs on the water-ways,
And the black gondolas swaying....
They were Americans
And English; yes, and French—
But always Americans,
Always feeding the doves,
Always caressing the doves,
Always protecting the doves!
War correspondent sombrely:
Yes—we used to feed the doves;
Now we are feeding guns.
The child, his eyes fixed upon the birds, breaks again into song:
All on the sunset evening,
In the cortile’s peace,
The soft grey doves came streaming
In ecstasied release;
Doves on my mother’s head
As she walked abroad with her laces,
Doves near the baby’s bed,
Doves in the window places,
Doves fanning the cornices there,
Doves flooding, rippling the square,
Cooing and preening and circling where
The fountain sprayed on its Graces—
Purple breasted graylings that fly
Into the blue tranquillity.
Now it seems they have no sky.
Bombs and smoke and horrors hover....
The day of wings and soaring is over.
The American, half smiling at the child’s fantastic quality—half angry at his pathos:
Why! Look you, the peace of a dove
Were a witless, silly thing!
Your doves there have their quarrels.
Notice that down-charged wing!
Hear that fretting and quarreling cooing
Trouble among the pigeons brewing!
The war correspondent laughs at his own impatience, then takes the child’s hand, stroking it tenderly and saying: