Page:Poems Tree.djvu/71

HOLY RUSSIA

THE ghostly blood of thee is in my veins,
Back through the centuries of death and birth,
Sometime I thrilled with thy gigantic pains,
My kin lie somewhere covered with thine earth.

And ever as in dreams I seem to see
Those streets and people with their colours cold;
Thou hast the singing hungers of the sea,
The tides of restless passion ages old.

I know thy humours and their contradiction,
I know thy fevers and hallucinations,
I see beneath the painted mask of fiction
Thy face of fierce and weary exaltations.

And art thou come to gaze with wakened eyes
Into the sick world's travail and her grief,
Dost thou from thy long battling surmise
The end of battle and the world's relief?

While we are creeping in our crooked ways
Along the crumbling roads of worn-out creeds
Where Ignorance walks royally through days
That smell of death, decay and bloody deeds.

While we still cry to God for strength to kill,
Reminding Him that Britain rules the waves,
And grind young bones for the commercial mill,
And build munition works among the graves.

Still crying "Honour," "Country" and "The Flag,"
"The last heroic fight in Freedom's name!"
Though Kings make mouths at Kings, and Prelates brag—
They boast of murder and they reek of shame! . . .

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