Hands off our dead! For all they did forbear
To drag them from their graves to point some speech;
Less sickening was the gas reek over there,
Less deadly was the shrapnel's whirring screech;
You cannot guess the uttermost they gave;
Those martyrs did not die for chattering daws
To loot false inspiration from the grave
When mouthing fools turn ghouls to gain applause.
SOLDIER-POET.
To Francis Fowler Hogan.
I think at first like us he did not see
The goal to which the screaming eagles flew;
For romance lured him, France, and chivalry;
But Oh! Before the end he knew, he knew!
And gave his first full love to Liberty,
And met her face to face one lurid night
While the guns boomed their shuddering minstrelsy
And all the Argonne glowed with demon light.
And Liberty herself came through the wood,
And with her dear, boy lover kept the tryst;
Clasped in her grand, Greek arms he understood
Whose were the fatal lips that he had kissed—
Lips that the soul of Youth has loved from old—
Hot lips of Liberty that kiss men cold.
DOOMED.
Connigis from Bois de la Jutte, July, 1918.
Left to its fate, the little village stands
Between the armies trenched on either hill,
Raising twin spires like supplicating hands
From meadow lands where all lies ghastly still.
The lakes of clover ripple to the breeze
As from the vineyards glides a rancid breath,
Bringing the homelike murmur of the bees,
Mixed with a sickening whiff of carrion death.
It is the valley of the shadow there,
Where death lies ambushed in the tossing flowers
Whose very beauty seems to cry, "Beware!"
For terror haunts its villages and towers.
That home where peasants led their blameless life,
That thatched, stone cottage is a clever trap
With painful wounds and fatal danger rife,
Noted with two red circles on the map.