April on the Battlefields / Leonora Speyer

April on the Battlefields

April now walks the fields again,
Trailing her leaves
And holding all her buds against her heart:
Wrapt in her clouds and mists
She walks,
Groping her way among the graves of men.
The green of earth is differently green,
A dreadful knowledge trembles in the grass
And little wide-eyed flowers die too soon:
There is a stillness here —
After a terror of all raving sound —
And birds sit close for comfort
On broken boughs.

April, thou grieve!
What of thy sun and glad, high wind,
Thy lifting hills and woods and eager brooks,
Thy thousand-petaled hopes?
The sky forbids thee sorrow, April!
And yet,
I see thee walking listlessly,
Across those scars that once were pregnant sod,
Those graves,
Those stepping-stones from life to life.

Death is an interruption between two heart-beats,
That I know
Yet know not how I know —
But April mourns,
Trailing her leaves,
The passion of her leaves,
Across the passion of those fearful fields.

Yes, all the fields!
No barrier here,
No challenge in the night,
No stranger-land,
No foe!
She passes with her perfect countersign,
Her green,
She wanders in her garden,
Dropping her buds like tears,
Spreading her lovely grief upon the graves of men.

~~
Leonora Speyer (1872-1956)
from A Canopic Jar, 1921

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

Leonora Speyer biography

  DrStew82, Chickamauga battlefield, April 2019 (detail). CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.