Helen Gray Cone

“ The great Experiment, the high Adventure,
The captain Hope: in all this I believe.
In this bright Flag of Liberty and Union:
Its red, the symbol of the blood of brothers
That flows through men of every race and nation ”

“ O Star-Flag, O Sky-Flag!
And well may you ripple as if you smiled,
Flag of our hearts’ delight!
We joy because you are aligned
With these the noblest of your kind:
We are yours and theirs with a single mind—
Let us on to the beckoning fight!
[Pg 26]
EARTH-BROWN ARMIES
Earth-brown armies, on the brown earth whither,
Ant-like swarming, rush ye in your wrath?
—We wrestle and we tug and we pull all together
To shift the giant Dead Thing that lies across the path.
Earth-brown armies, but should it roll and smother,
Log-like topple, and crush you in the clod? ”

“ Is in her memory? What struggle of sailors
In wild cold waves, at night?
With head thrown back
She looks upon the sea.
In every large curve of her broken body
Is trust, is triumph.
Against the sky she rises,
The light-filled, pure, ineffable azure sky;
Serene, unshaken,
Rises the Victory.
[Pg 96]
FLAGS AND THE SKY
I looked from my window:
I heard a whisper without from the rippling poplar,
I heard the wash of the river, its waves are never still;
I looked, and over the water the flag,
Alive as the river, alive as the rippling poplar,
Rippled too in the wind. ”

“ Blue that is the sky of God,
Red that is the blood of Man.
The web was woven, the web was one:
The stars sang when the work was done.
God had willed it to be worn—
Fit garment for the heavenly feast—
By Man, that was to be His son.
Only God could dream that dream!
When Time began, and Man was born, [Pg 4]
He clothed himself in the skin of the beast,
And under it beat the heart of the beast.
Not till Man be born God’s son
Shall he wear the Coat without a Seam! ”

“ He might have dreamed on the far faint hills—but he walked in the Main Street.
He knelt down with his fellows, in the warm faith of the throng;
He went forth with his fellows to fight a monstrous Wrong;
He marched away to the true tune that the hearts of brave men beat,
Shoulder to brown shoulder, with the men in the Main Street. ”

“ At the dawn-edge of the sky;
And he said, “O Mother, the Right is the Right:
I must fight for it now though I die!”
[Pg 33]
MOTHERS OF SOLDIERS
What should we say to you, O glorious Mothers
Sacred and full of sorrows, we childless ones?
We kneel to you as haloed women, we others,
The slighter lives that could not give their sons.
Not ours the exquisite anguish of surrender,
The deep, still courage that day by day endures,
The rosary of memories piercing-tender,
The travail and the triumph that are yours. ”

“ The love of bonny Scotland, it ran from head to feet.
O blessings on the heather hills, in white mist or sun!
O blessings on the kind books that make the clans as one!
And blessings on the bagpipes whose magic spanned the sea,
And brought bonny Scotland across the world to me!
[Pg 82]
WHEN THE ROSES GO DOWN TO THE SEA
On Gloucester moors the roses
Bloom haunted of the bee;
But there comes an hour of the summer
With the ebb-tide running free,
In a blue day of the summer,
When the roses go down to the sea.
The hands of the little children
Carry them to the shore ”

“ Thy nobleness as crime! Even thus oppressed,
Is not thy spirit mystically blest,
O little Belgium, marvellously great?
Thou that hast prized the soul above the flesh, [Pg 54]
Dost thou not, starving, eat of angels’ bread? ”