When the storm-clouds piled between us, In the dark and chasmed hour

When we struggled for a rebirth of our souls

And of our love for one another,

One thing held me to you.

It was not the expanding structures of love That we had builded together;

It was not vows,

Nor inner promises of eternal fealty,
Nor our common purposes in life,
Nor the clenching grasp of passion-

It was the battered little coffee-pot That we had bought together for five cents From a ghetto push-cart,

That would not let me go.

Clement Wood

SHAKESPEARE

Because, the singer of an age, he sang
The passions of the ages,

It was humanity itself that sprang
To life upon his pages.

He told no single being's tale-there beat

All beings on his pen;

And when he made a man to walk the street
Forth walked a million men.

Agnes Lee

THE HORSE THIEF

There he moved, cropping the grass at the purple canyon's lip. His mane was mixed with the moonlight that silvered his

snow-white side,

For the moon sailed out of a cloud with the wake of a spectral

ship,

I crouched and I crawled on my belly, my lariat coil looped wide.

Dimly and dark the mesas broke on the starry sky.

A pall covered every color of their gorgeous glory at noon. I smelt the yucca and mesquite, and stifled my heart's quick

cry,

And wormed and crawled on my belly to where he moved

against the moon!

Some Moorish barb was that mustang's sire. His lines were beyond all wonder.

From the prick of his ears to the flow of his tail he ached in my throat and eyes.

Steel and velvet grace! As the prophet says, God had "clothed his neck with thunder."

Oh, marvelous with the drifting cloud he drifted across the skies!

And then I was near at hand-crouched, and balanced, and

cast the coil;

And the moon was smothered in cloud, and the rope

through my hands with a rip!

But somehow I gripped and clung, with the blood in my brain aboil,

With a turn round the rugged tree-stump there on the purple canyon's lip.

Right into the stars he reared aloft, his red eye rolling and

raging.

He whirled and sunfished and lashed, and rocked the earth

to thunder and flame.

He squealed like a regular devil horse. I was haggard and spent and aging—

Roped clean, but almost storming clear, his fury too fierce

to tame.

And I cursed myself for a tenderfoot moon-dazzled to play

the part,

But I was doubly desperate then, with the possé pulled out

from town,

Or I'd never have tried it. I only knew I must get a mount and a start.

The filly had snapped her foreleg short. I had had to shoot her down.

So there he struggled and strangled, and I snubbed him around the tree.

Nearer, a little nearer-hoofs planted, and lolling

tongue

The Horse Thief

Till a sudden slack pitched me backward. He reared right

on top of me.

Mother of God-that moment! He missed me

and up I swung.

Somehow, gone daft completely and clawing a bunch of his

mane,

As he stumbled and tripped in the lariat, there I was—up and astride

And cursing for seven counties! And the mustang? Just

insane!

Crack-bang! went the rope; we cannoned off the treethen-gods, that ride!

A rocket-that's all, a rocket! I dug with my teeth and

nails.

Why we never hit even the high spots (though I hardly remember things),

But I heard a monstrous booming like a thunder of flapping

sails

When he spread—well, call me a liar!-when he spread those wings, those wings!

So white that my eyes were blinded, thick-feathered and wide

unfurled,

They beat the air into billows. We sailed, and the earth

was gone.

Canyon and desert and mesa withered below, with the world. And then I knew that mustang; for I-was Bellerophon!