The Earth Turns South/The Red Song

by Clement Richardson Wood

THE RED SONG

I.
They say, my song, I must grasp my heart
And squeeze you, drop by drop, from its agony.

So the lank Florentine sang of his dammed-up passion,
Lifting his virgin love above the clouds of angels.
So the crushed hearts of Poe and Thompson
Bled dark dyes for cloths of gloom
To shroud their young dead loves.
So Heine poured his gray and poisoned floods
Over her false soul who once let him love her.

Come forth then, heart:
Let me hold your live scarred vigor over this page,
And wring from you every clotted reminder
To line forth the blackened story of my love.

The drops fall, one by one—
A dead hollow sound, like the throb of a drum
With no body beneath it.
See how the dun spots stain the blank whiteness!

II.
From my earliest hour, I have been in love;
And she who drew the flow of my love to her,
And flooded me in the tide of hers,
Yielded to me from the first, kissed me, bound me,
Lent her warm breathingness to my fresh embrace. . . .
But ever when these preludes of love were done,
She fled from me, like a flame before a lifted wave.

She did not pass away from me,
She did not die, nor prove faithless.
But ever between me and those havening brown eyes
A bar was raised, that I could not overleap,
A gate was lowered, that left me shivering without,
A gulf was opened, whose depth was infinity.
She fled from me, fled from me, my beloved.
Even as at the due time of passion
I drew back from her.
We and a third, her first lover, raised the bar,
Let fall the gate, split wide the impassable gulf.

Blinded, I turned from her,
And flung myself through the eager throng of womankind,
Seeking in them my beloved.
Again and again I found her in another;
Sealing kiss and caress made me sure of her,—
And then the fog left my eyes,
And I saw a mocking enticer
Who was not what I sought.
There was no rest, no peace for me,
Until I could clench her shining self to my own.

I climbed into the infinite blackness of the gulf,
Seeking her glistening form;
The better to pass the imperative way
I stripped my soul of its full freightage
Of name and of race, of kindred and faiths;
I flung God from me in my passionate desire
To uncumber myself for the insistent way.
Ever the path grew steeper and gloomier,
Ever she fled before love was done.

I burned with a giant's fury
To storm the impossible ramparts of heaven,
To hurl God the Father out of His farthest place,
And achieve the beloved—my mother.
Ever my love burned more violently,
Ever her love beckoned, beyond the bar—
But it had been raised by the three of us
And by endless generations before us;
No hands—not even mine—could shake its rooted strength.

So was my naked soul battered and scarred,
So was my heart flamed with hopeless love,
Until its bruised blood stained the path to heaven,
And its weary cry of unfulfillment
Shrieked shuddering through all my dead and living moments.

The drops fall, one by one,—
The scarlet stain widens and darkens
To dead blackness.

III.
I will not yield to the hopeless fate,—
I, with a giant's strength and a giant's desire.

Look! I take the form of the beloved within my hands,
And, fired with a god's creative frenzy,
I shape anew a beloved that I can love.
I tear out, strand by strand,
Those chestnut tresses, hiding the depths of midnight,
That have strangled my soul so long;
I reach to the sun's great head
And plait his golden rays
For the tresses of a new beloved.

I pluck out the brooding brown eyes,
Those lights that lit my darkness
And led my feet straying
Into endless dismal swamps of despair;
I mold the sky's live blue
Into all-seeing eyes of a new beloved.

I take the willowy grace of the waves,
The sinuous flow of the wind,
The sky-flung curve of the mountains,
The delicate unrest of the Springy leaves,
And out of these I fashion a body
For my new beloved.

And last, I pluck out the sweet soul
That so long held my flood of love,
And place it back with its first lover;
And shape out of all starry rapture
A soul for my new beloved.

Scarred heart that beats so triumphantly,
Your dropping blood bugles a song of victory,
A glad and ringing hosannah!
Out of the dead gloom and the hopelessness,
Into the new morning of manhood,
I turn forever from the barred past,
And, singing, live, and, living, sing
My song of love and laughter!
Let the hills burn green, and the blossoms whiten,—
Let the odors of Spring dart over the wayside,
And the sun by day, and the stars by night,
Choir all the joys of love!
I am man, and woman is mine;
Together we blend, to create the future.

This is the red song of love.
My heart's glad drops are singing!