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