Selected Poetry

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LI, Issue 41, 1 October 1924, Page 56

Selected Poetry

APPROACHING AMERICA Came first, five hundred miles from port, A perching bird of homely sort, And next in tumbling waters grey Nantucket's gallant lightship lay Rocking, lonely, small and black, A moment's friend upon the track. And then at night from shores unseen Shone,, sparsely scattered lights serene, " .. Sweet tokens after all the days Shifting and void of the sea's ways: We watched past midnight to divine The incredible shore's uncertain line Then, very wakeful, went below Thrilled a new continent to know, x Long talked about in commonplace, Now a strange planet reach'd through space; We drained the flask we dared not keep And laughed and talked ourselves to sleep. Chill dawn; and through the porthole's glass t Firm-circled by its ring of brass A smoother sea, a warming fold ~ Of woods, browned with a year grown old. The coast-line of an English shire And in the midst a cosy spire. Solent and Staten Island, these Greet sisterly across the seas, And in confederate kindness spread For every stranger newly sped From either to the other shore Scenes he has known and loved before. Anchored we waited. The ship stirred, The shore went past. 0 dawning word 'That filled our souls with silent awe ! Lovely, things from heaven we saw, Over the waters far up stream Sublime companions of a dream: A fair phantasmal company Of goddesses in the morning sky, Concourse serene of starry powers Musing on other worlds than ours! The water sparkled: the sun shone: Mysteriously they were gone. Gone: in their places fixt appearing A mass of buildings, heightening, nearing, A noble group fit for a great ~. New hemisphere's majestic gate, • Till as we slowly steamed ahead , In straggling line the cluster spread. Each up its slice of skyway goes, Windows in thousand chessboard rows; Pointed and lean and broad and blunt ' Behind the rusty water-front, " In random rivalry they climb The oddest pinnacles of Time. J 7 C. Squire in American Poems and Others. ■ TO THOMAS HARDY ON HIS EIGHTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY A breath of 'hope, for those who have known despair; Of victory, for those who have drunk defeat; Of harvest, when the wounded fields lie bare, Or but a mist of green foreruns the wheat;

A breath of love, when all we loved lies dead: Of beauty, too remote for tongue to tell; Of joy, when sorrow veiled" and bowed the head; Of Heaven, for those that daily walked in Hell; His music .breathes it, for his wrestling soul Through agonies of denial postulates All that young eyes affirm. He proves his goal Divine, because he mourns the fast-barred gates; And by his grief for love and hope brought low 'Proves that the Highest ne'er would have it so. Alfred Noyes in the London. Sunday Times. V THE TRAVELLER What matter that his crippled feet About his room scarce carry him, His spirit finds adventures meet In Fez, Fashoda, Suakim. How can his world seem small and bare When his brown eyes, so kind yet keen, May welcome friends from here and there And see in them what they have seen? When summer seethes in his confines, He dreams of woodlands cool and dim, He strolls in Dante's haunts, the pines Of San Vitalo sing to him. And yet at times when hours creep by, Measured by couch and crutch and chair, His cloistered body seems to cry For the free world of Otherwhere. Ah! some day, when he shall have drawn The final ineffectual breath, He will set out across the dawn On that great journey men call Death. Robert Gilbert Welsh, in the New York World. ■ ■. * . THE:ANCRE AT HAMEL Where tongues were loud and hearts were light I heard the Ancre flow; • Waking oft at the mid of night I heard the Ancre flow. I heard it crying, that sad rill, Below the painful ridge, Past the burnt unraftered mill And the relic of a bridge. : And could this sighing water seem To call me far away, And its pale word dismiss as dream The voices of to-day? The voices in the 'bright room chilled And that mourned on alone, The silence of the midnight filled With that brook's troubling tone. The struggling Ancre had no part In these new hours of mine, And yet its stream ran through my heart, I heard it grieve and pine, As if its rainy tortured blood ; ' Had swirled into my own . When by its battered hank I stood ;•'.•' . And shared its wounded moan. —Edmund Bluvden, in' the Nexo Statesman:.