But over there, beyond the seas, where for years the war flags have been stacked and furled, comes the crack of a pistol followed by faint cheers. And now a smeary gloom appears; it seems to swell from out the earth; it bulges in greenish folds above the horizon, and in its depths are flashes from far-off guns. Suddenly from the heart of the cloud, which the cowed world watches, holding its breath, come thick insensate hammer-blows that split the core of earth asunder—the iron cannon unleashed for the dance of death. Deeper and deeper the noise unrolls in a vast salute to the new world from the old. It rises higher and higher, covering the sea with its tumult, and filling the sky with gouts and spatters of crimson fire. North, south, east, west, all the craters are emptying out their vitals on earth’s breast. But the immensity of the troubled continent stirs not, nor gives to the world the life that is restlessly heaving beneath it.
The centuries sit with hands on their knees, wearing on weary foreheads their iron-crowned destinies. The sun glares, the rain spatters, the thunder tramples his drums, the wind, rushing, hums its scorn; but the being—the thing that will master all the ages—still hesitates to be born. The great derricks, black and frozen, lift their arms in mid air; the locomotives hoot and mutter in despair; the shuttles clatter and clamor and hammer at the woof day and night. The black flight of priceless instants reels and rebounds and shivers and crawls, while without the uproar of the cannon calls like black seas battering the earth, grinding, sweeping, flickering, pounding, pounding, pounding, in the increasing throes of birth. But still the thing will not arrive. Still it refuses at the very gates of life. America—America—blood-stained and torn with choked, convulsive sighs, perhaps too late thou shalt arise, perhaps in vain shalt seek to rule the earth!
Poems
Maxwell Bodenheim
Silence
The wordless dream of the fire;
The white clock dropping gray minutes from its placid lips;
The breathing of women, like the birth of little winds;
The muttering of the man in the next room, painting a landscape;
I threw them together with a jerk of my soul-wrist,