My eyes catch ruddy necks Sturdily pressed back— All a red-brick moving glint. Like flaming pendulums, hands Swing across the khaki— Mustard-coloured khaki— To the automatic feet. We husband the ancient glory In these bared necks and hands. Not broke is the forge of Mars; But a subtler brain beats iron To shoe the hoofs of death (Who paws dynamic air now). Blind fingers loose an iron cloud To rain immortal darkness On strong eyes. BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES The darkness crumbles away— It is the same old druid Time as ever. Only a live thing leaps my hand— A queer sardonic rat— As I pull the parapet’s poppy To stick behind my ear. Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies (And God knows what antipathies). Now you have touched this English hand You will do the same to a German— Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between. It seems you inwardly grin as you pass Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes Less chanced than you for life, Bonds to the whims of murder, Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, The torn fields of France. What do you see in our eyes At the shrieking iron and flame Hurled through still heavens? What quaver—what heart aghast? Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins Drop, and are ever dropping; But mine in my ear is safe, Just a little white with the dust. KILLED IN ACTION Your “Youth”[2] has fallen from its shelf, And you have fallen, you yourself. They knocked a soldier on the head, I mourn the poet who fell dead. And yet I think it was by chance, By oversight you died in France. You were so poor an outward man, So small against your spirit’s span, That Nature, being tired awhile, Saw but your outward human pile; And Nature, who would never let A sun with light still in it set, Before you even reached your sky, In inadvertence let you die. Footnote 2: “Youth,” a volume of poems by I. Rosenberg. RETURNING, WE HEAR THE LARKS