Forward

I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes

In weary, woeful, waiting times;

And doleful hours of battle-din

Ere yet they brought the wounded in;

Through vigils of the fateful nights

In lousy barns by candle-light;

And dug-outs, sagging and aflood,

On stretchers stiff and bleared with blood;

By ragged grove, by ruined road,

By hearths accursed where love abode,

By broken altars, blackened shrines

I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes.

I've solaced me with scraps of song

The desolated ways along:

Through sickly fields all shrapnel-sown,

And meadows reaped by death alone;

By blazing cross and splintered spire,

By headless Virgin in the mire;

By gardens gashed amid their bloom,

By guttered grave, by shattered tomb;

Beside the dying and the dead,

Where rocket green and rocket red

In trembling pools of poising light,

With flowers of flame festoon the night.

Ah me! by what dark ways of wrong

I've cheered my heart with scraps of song.

So here's my sheaf of war-won verse,

And some is bad, and some is worse.

And if at times I curse a bit,

You needn't read that part of it;

For through it all like horror runs

The red resentment of the guns.

And you yourself would mutter when

You took the things that once were men

And sped them through that zone of hate

To where the dripping surgeons wait;

And wonder too if in God's sight

War ever, ever, can be right.

Yet may it not be, crime and war

But efforts misdirected are.

And if there's good in war and crime

There may be in my bits of rhyme,

My songs from out the slaughter mill:

So take or leave them as you will.