Bay A Book of Poems

Excerpt

GUARDS!

A Review in Hyde Park 1913.
The Crowd Watches.

WHERE the trees rise like cliffs, proud and
  blue-tinted in the distance,
Between the cliffs of the trees, on the grey-
  green park
Rests a still line of soldiers, red motionless range of
  guards
Smouldering with darkened busbies beneath the bay-
  onets' slant rain.

Colossal in nearness a blue police sits still on his horse
Guarding the path; his hand relaxed at his thigh,
And skyward his face is immobile, eyelids aslant
In tedium, and mouth relaxed as if smiling—ineffable
tedium!

So! So! Gaily a general canters across the space,
With white plumes blinking under the evening grey
  sky.
And suddenly, as if the ground moved
The red range heaves in slow, magnetic reply.

EVOLUTIONS OF SOLDIERS

The red range heaves and compulsory sways, ah see!
  in the flush of a march
Softly-impulsive advancing as water towards a weir
  from the arch
Of shadow emerging as blood emerges from inward
  shades of our night
Encroaching towards a crisis, a meeting, a spasm and
  throb of delight.

The wave of soldiers, the coming wave, the throbbing
  red breast of approach
Upon us; dark eyes as here beneath the busbies glit-
  tering, dark threats that broach
Our beached vessel; darkened rencontre inhuman, and
  closed warm lips, and dark
Mouth-hair of soldiers passing above us, over the wreck
  of our bark.

And so, it is ebb-time, they turn, the eyes beneath the
  busbies are gone.
But the blood has suspended its timbre, the heart from
  out of oblivion
Knows but the retreat of the burning shoulders, the
  red-swift waves of the sweet
Fire horizontal declining and ebbing, the twilit ebb of
  retreat.

THE LITTLE TOWN AT EVENING

THE chime of the bells, and the church clock
  striking eight
Solemnly and distinctly cries down the babel
  of children still playing in the hay.
The church draws nearer upon us, gentle and great
In shadow, covering us up with her grey.

Like drowsy children the houses fall asleep
Under the fleece of shadow, as in between
Tall and dark the church moves, anxious to keep
Their sleeping, cover them soft unseen.

Hardly a murmur comes from the sleeping brood,
I wish the church had covered me up with the rest
In the home-place. Why is it she should exclude
Me so distinctly from sleeping with those I love best?

LAST HOURS

THE cool of an oak's unchequered shade
Falls on me as I lie in deep grass
Which rushes upward, blade beyond blade,
While higher the darting grass-flowers pass
Piercing the blue with their crocketed spires
And waving flags, and the ragged fires
Of the sorrel's cresset—a green, brave town
Vegetable, new in renown.

Over the tree's edge, as over a mountain
Surges the white of the moon,
A cloud comes up like the surge of a fountain,
Pressing round and low at first, but soon
Heaving and piling a round white dome.
How lovely it is to be at home
Like an insect in the grass
Letting life pass.

There's a scent of clover crept through my hair
From the full resource of some purple dome
Where that lumbering bee, who can hardly bear
His burden above me, never has clomb....