| |
THY hills are kneeling in the tardy spring, | |
| And wait, in supplication’s gentleness, | |
| The certain resurrection that shall bring | |
| A robe of verdure for their nakedness. | |
| Thy perfumed valleys where the twilights dwell, | 5 |
| Thy fields within the sunlight’s living coil | |
| Now promise, while the veins of nature swell, | |
| Eternal recompense to human toil. | |
| And when the sunset’s final shades depart | |
| The aspiration to completed birth | 10 |
| Is sweet and silent; as the soft tears start, | |
| We know how wanton and how little worth | |
| Are all the passions of our bleeding heart | |
| That vex the awful patience of the earth. | |
| |
II
Thine are the large winds and the splendid sun | 15 |
| Glutting the spread of heaven to the floor | |
| Of waters rhythmic from far shore to shore, | |
| And thine the stars, revealing one by one, | |
| Thine the grave, lucent night’s oblivion, | |
| The tawny moon that waits below the skies,— | 20 |
| Strange as the dawn that smote their blistered eyes | |
| Who watched from Calvary when the Deed was done. | |
| And thine the good brown earth that bares its breast | |
| To thy benign October, thine the trees | |
| Lusty with fruitage in the late year’s rest; | 25 |
| And thine the men whose blood has glorified | |
| Thy name with Liberty Is divine decrees— | |
| The men who loved thy soil and fought and died. | |
| |
III
Toward thine Eastern window when the morn | |
| Steals through the silver mesh of silent stars, | 30 |
| I come unlaurelled from the strenuous wars | |
| Where men have fought and wept and died Forlorn. | |
| But here, across the early fields of corn, | |
| The living silence dwelleth, and the gray | |
| Sweet earth-mist, while afar the lisp of spray | 35 |
| Breathes from the ocean like a Triton’s horn. | |
| Open thy lattice, for the gage is won | |
| For which this earth has journeyed though the dust | |
| Of shattered systems, cold about the sun; | |
| And proved by sin, by mighty lives impearled, | 40 |
| A voice cries through the sunrise: “Time is just!”— | |
| And falls like dew God’s pity on the world | |
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