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The Spike: or, Victoria University College Review, June 1916

The Call of Earth

page 35

The Call of Earth.

Strange thoughts come plucking at our skirts,
Meek-voiced upbraidings cling about our tread
Such time as moonrise when the stars
Are whispering overhead,
So far beyond this shuddering real
Whose need our mind outsoars:
The dream-flowers at our feet have held,
And still we crush them white to red.

Look to those pictured silences,
Nor see alone an angle hovering-place,—
Much more, the gardened nebulae
Hold star-friends face to face,
Who lean across from verge to verge
And voice such inner sighs
As trouble Heaven,—not for our ears
So deaf to even Earth's loud tears,

Sky fastnesses are banking clouds
Whose shape the universe does timely mould.
The rainbow's many-prismed drops
Time out of mind have told
The interplay of force with force.
Our pauses fill with song.
Heaven's swift lights fall across our world
And all things hidden are unfurled.

Unfurled to those whose souls may hear,
The immemorial beating of sad leaves
Above the pageantry of sound
Men raise beneath their eaves,
When deathly rustling in dismay,
Once green and sap-enthrilled,
The fallen ones that left the tree
Before a driving madness flee.

Have they not all been gaily branching,
And held their youth as pennon for the wind,
Drunk of the honey-tinctured air,
Knowing not that they sinned,
If it were sin to laugh and live
In murmuring roundelay
Such life as seed and soil decree,
And but within those limits free?

page 36

The grey leaf forms, articulate
With pleading, step in saddened revelry,
The everlasting spirit wind
That swayed the mother tree,
Low sounding through their phantom whirl,
Instinctively proclaims
How these unburied deathly feet
Will tramp the pavement of eternity,

Until the human leaves that lie
Disheveled on the untracked wastes of life
Exchange their drooping monotones
For canticles all rife
With memories of native grace,
And tones commensurate
With all the heights and depths a soul
May touch, untrammeled for its goal.

The heavy beat of fallen leaves
Still moves unsilenced of its tragedy,
While overhead the stars look on
In wondering agony,
To see men studying the heavens
All heedless of the earth
Whose flowers and leaves the winds have left
Upon the grass to die unwept.

—M. E. H.