Percy MacKaye Poems

Fluid the world flowed under us: the hills
   Billow on billow of umbrageous green
   Heaved us, aghast, to fresh horizons, seen
One rapturous instant, blind with flash of rills
...

A bomb has fallen over Notre Dame:
Germans have burned another Belgian town:
Russians quelled in the east: England in qualm:
...

A star a star in the west!
Out of the wave it rose:
And it led us forth on a world-far quest;
Where the mesas scorched and the moorlands froze.
...

I
URIEL, you that in the ageless sun
Sit in the awful silences of light,
Singing of vision hid from human sight,—
...

(In memory of William Vaughn Moody)

I
...

Now is the midnight of the nations: dark
Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas,
Earth, like a mother in birth agonies,
...

A man went down to Panama
Where many a man had died
To slit the sliding mountains
And lift the eternal tide:
...

Half artist and half anchorite,
Part siren and part Socrates,
Her face -- alluring fair, yet recondite --
...

I
Old Hezekiah leaned hard on his hoe
And squinted long at Eben, his lank son.
The silence shrilled with crickets. Day was done,
...