The Earth Turns South/Immortality

by Clement Richardson Wood

For works with similar titles, see Immortality.

IMMORTALITY

For Crystal Eastman and Walter G. Fuller

Come, War! Come, mad destruction, come!
Thump with your glum and thundering drum,
Let all shrill-piercing bugles peal,
Waken the angry snarl of steel,
Till men come tumbling at your heel,
Welcoming out of the sky the hell
Of withering bomb and bursting shell,
And the slow-rolling deaths that creep,
Impalpable, along the ground,
Stifling the cannon's sullen sound,
Bringing the final quivering sleep
On blackened land and ruined town
And desolate, deserted sea.
The years' slow progress crumbles down,
As war makes sure his sovereignty.

Come, War, best comrade! Swiftly come!
For as you pass, our lips are dumb,
Our bodies stiffen, and grow numb. . . .
And then, and imperceptibly,
What was mankind with all its chatter,
Its thus and so, its futile clatter,
Begins to tremble restlessly,
Begins to melt away, and scatter,
Speeding in changing ways; it lifts
Where lilacs bud in purple drifts,
It mounts the greenly glowing trees,
It seeps into the parent earth,
And joins the cool and liquid mirth
Of brooks that bubble to the seas;
It lends its agile ordered strength
To cattle, and to ants that crawl;
It writhes within the serpent's length,
It peals the thrush's whistling call.
Men and women and children die,—
Seeds plowed under by bomb and shell,—
Scatter, and recombine, and swell
A lovely harvest toward the sky.

As men, we were not worthy; we
Were weighed, found wanting, and set free
From suicidal liberty.
For lilac bush and slender larch
Are fixed too firm to "Forward, March!"
And laughing water cannot wet
With what drips from a bayonet;
And snake and cattle do not loose
Their honor to a hateful use,
Nor do the thrushes of the sky
Prepare a wholesale way to die.
Man jars the skyey harmony;
So War, best savior, comes, to friend
Him to his red and sudden end,
Setting his prisoned substance free
For kindlier immortality!