What seek you in this hoarse hard sand
That, shuffles from your futile hand?
Your limbs are wry. With salt despair
All day the scant winds freeze your hair.
What mystery in the barren sand
Seek you to understand?
All day the acute winds' finger-tips
Flay my skin and cleave my lips.
But though like flame about my skull
Leap the gibes of the cynic gull,
I shall not go from this place. I
Seek through all curved vacancy
Though the sea taunt me and frost scar,
I seek a star, a star!
Why seek you this, why seek you this
Of all distraught futilities?
The tide slides closer. The tide's teeth
Shall bite your body with keen death!
Of all unspaced things that are
Vain, vain, most hideously far,
Why seek you then a star?
I seek a wild star, I that am
Eaten by earth and, all her shame;
To whom fields, towns are a close clot
Of mud whence the worm dieth not;
To whom all running water is
Besnagged with timeless treacheries,
Who in a babe's heart see designed
Mine own distortion and the blind
Lusts of all my kind!
Hence of all vain things that are
Fain, most hideously far,
A star, I seek, a star!
MY LADY OF PEACE
In the sickening away of the trumpets and the shuddering
of the drums,
She comes, my Lady of Peace, with her grief, her grief,
she comes.
With the blood on her teeth she comes, the lost wild
eyeballs stare;
There is foam in the blood on her lips; ashes are strewn
in her hair.
Like flowers are her dry fingers, pale flowers grey frost
has nipped,
Being empty of hands they held like desolate seas
unshipped.
And she dances, the strayed white woman, she dances a
forlorn tread,
Being sad for the men that are living and glad for the men
that are dead.
OUR JACK
Our Jack is dead, our jolly and simple Jack.
To him are fierce stars clay and snow is black.
Black blinding silences are all his hours,
He knows not birds nor laughter nor any flowers.