THE FIRST AIRMAN.
GIVE me the wings, magician. I will know
What blooms on airy precipices grow
That no hand plucks, large unexpected blossoms,
Scentless, with cry of curlews in their bosoms,
And the great winds like grasses where their stems
Spangle the universe with diadems.
I will pluck those flowers and those grasses, I,
Icarus, drowning upwards through the sky
With air that closes underneath my feet
As water above the diver. I will meet
Life with the dawn in heaven, and my fingers
Dipped in the golden floss of hair that lingers
Across the unveiled spaces and makes them colder,
As a woman’s hair across her naked shoulder.
Death with the powdered stars will walk and pass
Like a man’s breath upon a looking-glass,
For a suspended heart-beat making dim
Heaven brighter afterwards because of him.
Give me the wings, magician. So their tune
Mix with the silver trumpets of the moon
And, beyond music mounting, clean outrun
The golden diapason of the sun.
There is a secret that the birds are learning
Where the long lanes in heaven have a turning
And no man yet has followed; therefore these
Laugh hauntingly across our usual seas.
I’ll not be mocked by curlews in the sky;
Give me the wings magician, or I die.
His call for wings or death was heard and thus
Came both to the first airman, Icarus.
MARY.
(Sister of Martha.)
THERE was no star in the East the night I came
With spikenard in hushed Jerusalem—
But a light in an upper chamber dimly lit
Was star enough—I would have followed it
Through lonelier streets unto the smaller room
Where afterwards it blossomed in the tomb.
Light of the world, but how much more to me
The light that other women also see!
No choiring angels in gold groups adored
Their king that night, but searching for my Lord
Unchoired, uncrowned, whose Kingdom had not come,
I heard none call, but dumb, as death is dumb,
The night misled his angels, or may be
Night and the angels made a way for me.
My footfalls in the street rang very clear
As I drew on. It seemed that all must hear
My coming, eyes that peered behind the grating,
Cloaked hands to hold me at each corner waiting.
But nothing stirred till suddenly there ran
The flame of the moon in heaven for a span
Less than a heart-beat, and I saw a man
Steal out of Simon’s house, and pass me by
With such a horror on his lips that I,
Also a traitor, shrunk and knew him not—
Him that was Judas called Iscariot.
Also a traitor I, because I came
Not worshipping the Master in that Name
That his disciples called him, not the Christ
Of God for me that night. I sought a tryst
With a man of men, and if my heart had won
The Son of God had died in Mary’s son,
And he, who, knowing the appointed evil,
Sent forth Iscariot to his task, a devil,
Also accepted, though this was more hard,
The sweet betrayal of the spikenard.
He knew me what I meant and in his eyes,
That for a moment smiled, was Paradise
Lost unto love, that for the greater sin
Than even Judas’ might not enter in.
And when the disciples would have stayed my hands,
“She does but good” He said “she understands.”
And I who poured the unguent understood,
But good it was not, as a man means good.
For I forget the Master, I but see
(A woman taken in adultery
With a dream and a dream) his human face
I would have saved from God, and in the place
Of Gospel and of resurrection I
Hear him say “Mary” and behold him die.
Judas, to death who sold him for a kiss,
Sinned less than I, who’d buy him back for this.
And Christ forgave me—How shall I forgive
Jesus, my love, the man who would not live?
THE SICILIAN EXPEDITION.
TO-DAY the Triremes sailed for Sicily
With no wind stirring on a soundless sea;
But a great crying of birds beat up and filled
The empty caverns of the air and stilled
The thrashing of the oars. The level sun
Unto himself, it seemed, drew one by one
With strings of gold the ships that no one heard
Move on the waters, till at last one bird
(Of all the wings past knowledge and past counting)
Wheeled upwards on the air and mounting, mounting,
Rose out of human sight, but all the rest
Passed with the passing fleet into the West.
To-day the Triremes sailed—and will their sailing
Prosper or fail because a gull was wailing
For crumbs about the prows? Who but a fool
Would find a message in a screaming gull?
For if gods use such messengers as these
The less gods they (or so says Socrates).
They are not gods (he says) of fear and hate,
A swollen type of man degenerate,
Catching at flattery, at sorrow fleering
And every spiteful whisper overhearing;
But largely on their mountain they attend
Unflinchingly the one appointed end,
When what was nobly done and finely striven
Will find the archetype laid up in heaven.
Not these by gulls pronounce or suffer doom,
Nor cries among the ships (and yet the gloom
Settles about Athene’s temple. If
An injured god used his prerogative
Of anger, might not Hermes?)—that’s the gull
Stirring the superstition of a fool!
What if a week ago we, waking, found
The Hermae spoiled or fallen to the ground?
Shall Fate be altered or a doom be spoken
Because an image was in malice broken?
Or Athens, that remembers Marathon,
Rock in her empire for a splintered stone?
How dear she is—was never city else
So loved, or lovely in her strength; like bells
Pealed in the brain her beauty. This is she,
Athens, whose sweeter name is liberty.
To-day the Triremes sailed—as Zeus decrees
All shall be done; but hardly Socrates,
As Westward in the dark our captains wear,
Would frown if an Athenian spoke a prayer
Even to Hermes, (even though it seem
We fear the flight of birds and cries in him),
Thus saying simply for the love of her—
Athens—“O Hermes, called the Messenger,
God of the wings, since now the sails are set,
If aught was evil, evil now forget!
If aught was left undone, think not of this
But her remember, Hermes, what she is,
A city leaning to the sea, and shod
With freedom on her feet, as thou a god
With wings art poised for flight—O, if the gull
Were bird of thine, Hermes, be merciful.”