MUSIC The house is still. The very pictures on the walls have lost their painted meaning. The place seems new and strangely vacant. I see the old brown Chinese figure in the panel facing me; he has a look of stupid blankness that is utterly new. The three big dogs asleep here at my feet What cabalistic word will be required to rouse them from their almost deathlike slumbers? So still so still the house My heart so still. And I might lift my head and speak and move about and change all this, But that I know what thing has made it so; Whose absence the place can feel, Whose voice is heard no more. And I think of the great free-sounding melodies that filled the room Great silhouettes that passed And clear full living tones that live no longer. This is the lifeless vacuum left by the passage of the storm. FOREWARNED What have I to do with the world? What has the world to do with me Who know now that in the end I must have traffic Only with the things of my own spirit. PROPHETS Prophet of joy! Before ever the deed lived, you came. Be the fulfilment what it was, I do prostrate myself for love and lay here at your feet my heart of thanks. Prophet of evil! It is now your hour! Swiftly, A VOICE BREAKS IN UPON THE SILENCE Silently, Winding through some unsensed aerial channel, Whatever the day bring forth, that will I greet— Helen Louise Birch THE SOAP-BOX "This my song is made for Kerensky.” O market square, O slattern place, Heaven's mass is sung, By wind and dust and birds: While wave the banners red, A mass for soldiers dead. When you leave your faction in the once-loved hall, Stand then on the corner under starry skies, And get you a gang of the worn and the wise. The soldiers of the Lord may be squeaky when they rally, Enforcing with the bayonet the thing the ages teach Free speech! Free speech! Down with the Prussians, and all their works! Down with the Turks! Down with every army that fights against the soap-box- The old-Elijah, Jeremiah, John-the-Baptist soap-box, The Karl-Marx, Henry-George, Woodrow-Wilson soap-box. Andrew Jackson liberty, bleeding-Kansas liberty, Battleship of thought, the round world over, Loved by the broken-hearted, Fair young amazon or proud tough rover; Loved by the lion, Loved by the lion, Loved by the lion!— Feared by the fox. Death at the bedstead of every Kaiser knocks. Beauty is born. Ring every sleigh-bell, ring every church bell, Hail the Russian picture around the little box: Troops in files, Generals in uniform, Mujiks in their smocks, And holy maiden soldiers who have cut away their locks. All the people of the world, little folk and great, Are tramping through the Russian Soul as through a city gate, As though it were a street of stars that paves the shadowy deep; And mighty Tolstoi leads the van along the stairway steep. But now the people shout: "Hail to Kerensky-he hurled the tyrants out!" And this my song is made for Kerensky, Prophet of the world-wide intolerable hope There on the soap-box, seasoned, dauntless, There amid the Russian celestial kaleidoscope, Flags of liberty, rags and battlesmoke. Moscow-Chicago! Come let us praise battling Kerensky! Bravo! bravo! Comrade Kerensky, thunderstorm and rainbow, |