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Ave!

You have come from west of the sunset in the silent ships at eve,
From the seas beyond our sorrow, through the breakers' change and chime,
Over the surge and the silence, their hiss and heave,
And have fluttered on the borders of the barren lands of time.

We were weary with night-long watching for the banners of the day,
We were faint with the venom of hating and flagellant of fear,
We were strange to the joy of hoping as we clung to our god of clay
And we shuddered for the summer when we saw the leaves grow sere.

We have seen you march in the noon-glare and have watched you tramp in the mire,
In a rolling river of rifles you passed down the silent street.
We have seen the steel of your bayonets drip forth tierce silver fire,
And the tremulous dew of the grasses make rain to the swing of your feet.

There are some have fought in the sea-mists and some on the dripping plain,
And some by the sullen breaches where slow waves curve fretted foam,
And though they be from the desert or damp with the northern rain,
Now under the shivering dawn-star gleams the white wake to home.

There are strange new voices stirring in the portals of the east,
And the waves of blue Aegean sing a new song to the sun,
Where the home-turned prows of troopships churn their surface to a yeast
After weary years of warring, with their meed of fighting done.

You have come to us with the dawn-wind and have gone in the sunset glow,
And the sound of your feet was as silence and your voice was the sob of the breeze,
Or the murmur of many waters and was lost in their rippling bow,
And you went to the thrilling of trumpets through the shimmering western seas.

You went with a clatter of hoof-beats; you come with a halting tread.
You sailed to a blaze of glory; you come to a sky grown cold,
You tossed a fair flower of manhood to a world war-worn and old,
And the steel-hard set of your eyelids speaks soft of the silent dead.

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There were some who died in the sea-mists and some on the dripping plain,
Some who sleep by the sullen beaches where slow waves curve tender foam;
But though they lie in the desert or under the northern rain
They sighed for the shimmering dawn-star and the whispering winds of home.

August, 1919. C. P.