Consciousness.

From the first dawn, when God looked down,
Dreamed, and began His weaving
Of earth and all the firmament,
So man began believing.
Out of first man's first conscious joy,
Of taking, or of giving;
Out of his first imagined woe,
Was born all conscious living.
Not worship of an unknown god,
Through fear, or love, or duty,
But worship of the earth he knew,
And earth's abiding beauty.
As primal man wrote down, long since,
In blood, the worth of living,
So would I fight to make it worth,
The having—and the giving.
And, looking back, down aeons lost
Of time, to earth's beginning,
I have no doubt that what earth gave—
And took; was worth the winning.

E. Mary Gurney.

* * *

Estuary Change.

Jubilantly heaping round this hull
(Sky-masted, leaping to deepened flood),
Sea follows seasons; boat at tide's turn
Gives keel to mud, flank to the cloudhung gull.
Man's the only fool who'll yearn
For ever-brimming surge and moonbright flood,
Mantling illusion round a star seabeautiful
Or dawn's crisp wave washed in the sun's blood,
Mindful that intermittently in heart elate,
Recurrently hope's estuaries ebb, back flow,
Oceans of joy, and heart's left desolate
—But floods as suddenly, warming with indigo.

D. G.

The Invader.

About when dawn came and the curtains paled
Someone was in my room, one light of foot
And small to slip through keyholes. Straight I lay
As marble women on their tombs, nor quailed
To hear those footfalls yelveted in grey.
So strange my bed, hung over the abyss,
So high the gusty steeps of dream… Then put
The wind his icy lips against my head,
In some caress, too absent for a kiss,
As those long blind, reach out for those long dead.
Over my breast, I felt the little palm
Wetted with rain stroke down, subdued and calm.

“Robin Hyde.”

* * *

Wonders

Here are a thousand wonders; ships of steel
That speed beyond the seas; and marvellous craft
That challenge airy oceans; here are words
From half the world away, heard clear and loud;
Here are bright lights that flash as dusk, to make
Night's terror fade, and here great buildings tall.
Here is fair art, proud science, here the plan
Of nature turned to profit; here is Man!
And yet—
The smallest star that shivers out at even,
And trembles in the vast half-hesitant,
A tiny silver gleam against the blue
Infinity of space where echoes die
And no winds ever blow; a scintillant spark
Shot from the dreaming of a Deity—
Is this not lovelier and stranger far
Than all the miracles of science are?

E. F.

A Memory.

When first I kissed my Nancy
'Twas on a railway train
A little tuft of thistledown
Danced by the window pane.
She asked me what it symbolised
I kissed her to explain.
When first I kissed my Nancy
'Twas on a railway train.
Her heart was light as thistledown
Her mouth as soft as rain.
And something wakened in her eyes
That long asleep had lain.
It seems but yesterday somehow.
Where's thistledown, where's Nancy now?

J. Connelly.

* * *

Echo.

Across a span of centuries it fling; a pagan call,
And beats into your heart, Sea Child, with every seagull's cry.
It mingles with the same torn wind that filled the high grey sails
Flecking the years now swept aside by Time's eternal flails.
And it breathes again, as life re-born, beneath the dead years’ pall
In each whispered murmur dropping from the greyness of a gaunt, grim sky.
It hints of primal freedom shrouded in the carven bows
Crested with tall stern figureheads that rifted the unknown seas.
And it muffles the stir of the iron boats threshing the chartered waves,
And blurrs the routes travel-defined, that a new day's knowledge paves.
In its voice is the wild uncertainty that clung to the slender prows,
And the magic of conquered winds and seas, and exultant discoveries.
And so, in the depth of your soul that stirs as the vast sea dips
Is an aching throb—the ancient call—echo of wooden ships.

Robin Lincoln.