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Others will spread the board now you are gone
Here where you smiled and gave your guests to eat,
Learning your menial kingliness from One
Who washed His servant's feet;

Along the slumbering corridors betimes
Others will knock and other footsteps pass
Down the wet lane e'er the thin shivering chimes
Toll for the early mass.

Yet in the chapel's self no sorrows sing
In the strange priest's voice, nor any dolour grips
The heart because it is not you who bring
Your Master to its lips.

Here let us leave the things you would not have—
Vain grief and sorrow useless to be shown—
"God's gift and the Community's I gave
And nothing of my own,"

You would have said, self-deemed of no more worth
That then green hands that guard a poppy's grace—
Blows the eternal flower and back to earth
Tumbles the withered case.

Nay, but Our Lord hath made renouncement vain,
Himself into those humble hands let fall,
Guerdon of willing poverty and pain,
The greatest gift of all;

To you and all who in that life austere
Mid fields remote your harsher labours ply
Singing His praise, girt round from year to year
With sheep-bells and the sky—