Written by
Emile Verhaeren |
Alas! when the lead of illness flowed in my benumbed veins with my heavy, sluggish blood, with my blood day by day heavier and more sluggish;
When my eyes, my poor eyes, followed peevishly on my long, pale hands the fatal marks of insidious malady;
When my skin dried up like bark, and I had no longer even strength enough to press my fiery lips against your heart, and there kiss our happiness;
When sad and identical days morosely gnawed my life, I might never have found the will and the strength to hold out stoically,
Had you not, each hour of the so long weeks, poured into my daily body with your patient, gentle, placid hands the secret heroism that flowed in yours.
|
Written by
Robert William Service |
"You're bloody right - I was a Red,"
The Man from Cook's morosely said.
And if our chaps had won the War
Today I'd be the Governor
Of all Madrid, and rule with pride,
Instead of just a lousy guide.
"For I could talk in Councils high
To draw down angels from the sky.
They put me seven years in gaol, -
You see how I am prison-pale .
.
.
Death sentence! Each dawn I thought
They'd drag me out and have me shot.
"Maybe far better if they had:
Suspense like that can make one mad.
Yet here I am serene and sane,
And at your service to explain
That gory battlefield out there,
The Cité Universitaire.
"See! Where the Marzanillo flows,
The women used to wash our cloths;
And often, even in its flood,
It would be purpled by our blood.
Contemptuous of shot and shell
Our women sang and - fought like hell.
"Deep trenches there ran up and down,
And linked us with the sightless town;
And every morn and every night
We sallied savagely to fight .
.
.
By yon ravine in broken clad
I shot and killed a soldier lad.
"Such boys they were: methinks that one
Looked to me like my only son.
He might have been; they told my wife
Before Madrid he lost his life.
Sweet Mary! Oh if I but knew
It was not my own son I slew.
.
.
.
"
So spoke that man with eye remote
And stains of gravy on his coat;
I offered him a cigarette,
And as he sighed with vain regret,
Said he: "Don't change your dollars - wait:
I'll get you twice the market rate.
"
|
Written by
Robert William Service |
In the moonless, misty night, with my little pipe alight,
I am sitting by the camp-fire's fading cheer;
Oh, the dew is falling chill on the dim, deer-haunted hill,
And the breakers in the bay are moaning drear.
The toilful hours are sped, the boys are long abed,
And I alone a weary vigil keep;
In the sightless, sullen sky I can hear the night-hawk cry,
And the frogs in frenzied chorus from the creek.
And somehow the embers' glow brings me back the long ago,
The days of merry laughter and light song;
When I sped the hours away with the gayest of the gay
In the giddy whirl of fashion's festal throng.
Oh, I ran a grilling race and I little recked the pace,
For the lust of youth ran riot in my blood;
But at last I made a stand in this God-forsaken land
Of the pine-tree and the mountain and the flood.
And now I've got to stay, with an overdraft to pay,
For pleasure in the past with future pain;
And I'm not the chap to whine, for if the chance were mine
I know I'd choose the old life once again.
With its woman's eyes a-shine, and its flood of golden wine;
Its fever and its frolic and its fun;
The old life with its din, its laughter and its sin --
And chuck me in the gutter when it's done.
Ah, well! it's past and gone, and the memory is wan,
That conjures up each old familiar face;
And here by fortune hurled, I am dead to all the world,
And I've learned to lose my pride and keep my place.
My ways are hard and rough, and my arms are strong and tough,
And I hew the dizzy pine till darkness falls;
And sometimes I take a dive, just to keep my heart alive,
Among the gay saloons and dancing halls.
In the distant, dinful town just a little drink to drown
The cares that crowd and canker in my brain;
Just a little joy to still set my pulses all a-thrill,
Then back to brutish labour once again.
And things will go on so until one day I shall know
That Death has got me cinched beyond a doubt;
Then I'll crawl away from sight, and morosely in the night
My weary, wasted life will peter out.
Then the boys will gather round, and they'll launch me in the ground,
And pile the stones the timber wolf to foil;
And the moaning pine will wave overhead a nameless grave,
Where the black snake in the sunshine loves to coil.
And they'll leave me there alone, and perhaps with softened tone
Speak of me sometimes in the camp-fire's glow,
As a played-out, broken chum, who has gone to Kingdom Come,
And who went the pace in England long ago.
|