In its long widowhood the world has striven To find diversion. It has turned away From the vast aweful silences of Heaven (Which answer but with silence when we pray) And sought for something to assuage its grief. Some surcease and relief From sorrow, in pursuit of mortal joys. It drowned God’s stillness in a sea of noise; It lost God’s presence in a blur of forms; Till, bruised and bleeding with life’s brutal storms, Unto immutable and speechless space The World lifts up its face, Its haggard, tear-drenched face, And cries aloud for faith’s supreme reward, The promised Second Coming of its Lord. So many widows, widows everywhere, The whole earth teems with widows. Guns that blare— Winged monsters of the air— And deep-sea monsters leaping through the water, Hell bent on slaughter, All these plough paths for widows. Maids at dawn, And brides at noon, ere eventide pass on Into the ranks of widows: but to weep Just for a little space; then will grief sleep In their young bosoms, where sweet hope belongs, New love will sing once more its age-old songs, And life bloom as a rose-tree blooms again After a night of rain. There are complacent widows clothed in crêpe Who simulate a grief that is not real. Through paths of seeming sorrow they escape From disappointed hopes to some ideal, Or, from the penury of unloved wives Walk forth to opulent lives. And there are widows who shed all their tears Just at the first In one wild burst, And then go lilting lightly down the years: Black butterflies, they flit from flower to flower And live in the thin pleasures of the hour; Merging their tender memories of the dead In tenderer dreams of being once more wed. But there are others: women who have proved That loving greatly means so being loved. Women who through full beauteous years have grown Into the very body, souls, and heart Of their dear comrades. When death tears apart Such close-knit bonds as these, and one alone Out to the larger freer life is called, And one is left— Then God in heaven must sometimes be appalled At the wild anguish of the soul bereft, And unto His Son must say, ‘I did not know Mortals could suffer so.’ But Christ, remembering Gethsemane, Will answer softly, ‘It was known to Me.’ God’s alchemist, old Time, will merge to calm That bitter anguish; but there is no balm Save the sweet certitude that each long day Is one step in a stair That circles up to where freed spirits stay. Widows, so many widows everywhere. _The world was widowed by the death of Christ_, _And nothing_, _nothing_, _nothing has sufficed_ _To bring back comfort to the stricken house_ _From whence has gone the Master and the Spouse_. _Hasten_, _dear Lord_, _with Thy Millennium_, _Hasten and come_.