Saturday, December 29, 2018

Christmas 1915 / Percy MacKaye


Christmas 1915

Now is the midnight of the nations: dark
   Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas,
   Earth, like a mother in birth agonies,
Screams in her travail, and the planets hark
Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark
   Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees
   Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades
Wrenching the night’s imponderable arc.

Christ! What shall be delivered to the morn
   Out of these pangs, if ever indeed another
   Morn shall succeed this night, or this vast mother
Survive to know the blood-spent offspring, torn
   From her racked flesh?— What splendour from the smother?
What new-wing’d world, or mangled god still-born?

~~
Percy MacKaye (1875-1956)
from A Treasury of War Poetry, 1917

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States]

Percy MacKaye biography

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