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Ivor Gurney
The destined bullet wounded him,
They brought him down to die,
Far-off a bugle sounded him
“Retreat,” Good-bye.
Strange, that from ways so hated,
And tyranny so hard
Should come this strangely fated
And farewell word.
He thought, “Some Old Sweat might
Have thrilled at heart to hear,
Gone down into the night
Too proud to fear!
But I--the fool at arms,
Musician, poet to boot,
Who hail release; what charms
In this salute?”
How does it happen, tell me,
That I who was most erudite of lawyers,
Who knew Blackstone and Coke
Almost by heart, who made the greatest speech
The court-house ever heard, and wrote
A brief that won the praise of Justice Breese
How does it happen, tell me,
That I lie here unmarked, forgotten,
While Chase Henry, the town drunkard,
Has a marble block, topped by an urn
Wherein Nature, in a mood ironical,
Has sown a flowering weed?
A solemn and impressive band,
With decorations in their hats
Like admirals and diplomats ;
And yet, their job is filling men
As dumb as they, with oxygen —
For all the splendid pomp they wear.
They do but pump the world with air.
Proving, that trees, beneath their hats,
Are admirals and diplomats.
The lapidary care bestowed
By God in fashioning the toad;
The expert craftsmanship which He
Spent on the gnu's topography;
The thought which loosened from that Brow
The crab, the camel and the cow,
With equal lavishness He spent
On many a priest and president.
Soldiers have to fight and swear
To win the stripes they proudly wear;
While zebras, most unfit for war.
Have stripes enough to fill a corps.
Such unequal distribution
Is part of Heaven's constitution.
The wind was shrill and mercenary,
Like a housewife pacing down the sky.
Green weeds and tin-cans in the yard
Made a debris of ludicrous dissipations.
The ochre of cold elations
Had settled on the cans.
Their brilliant labels peeped from the weeds,
Like the remains of a charlatan.
A bone reclined against a fence-post
And mouldily congratulated life.
A woman's garter wasted its faded frills
Upon a newspaper argument.
The shipwrecked rancor of bottles and boxes
Was pressed to disfigured complexities.
A smell of torrential asperity
Knew the spirit of the yard.
An arid daylight shines along the beach
Dried to a grey monotony of tone,
And stranded jelly-fish melt soft upon
The sun-baked pebbles, far beyond their reach
Sparkles a wet, reviving sea. Here bleach
The skeletons of fishes, every bone
Polished and stark, like traceries of stone,
The joints and knuckles hardened each to each.
And they are dead while waiting for the sea,
The moon-pursuing sea, to come again.
Their hearts are blown away on the hot breeze.
Only the shells and stones can wait to be
Washed bright. For living things, who suffer pain,
May not endure till time can bring them ease.