POEMS
LINES: I PRAISE GOD'S MANKIND
IN AN OLD WOMAN
I praise God's mankind in an old woman :
I hear him rattle the body of an old wife
Dry and brown, and bitter as bracken,
Her stalk womb-canceled, sere with seedgone;
With shrivel fingers clutching upon her life,
Wrestling for the empty pod and the dry leaf.
But still in her mildewed eyes moist's last token–
But oh, ever in her eyes the flash and strife,
Husk edge, cruel and sharp as any knife
Which not God 's death itself can unsharpen.
Not all the frosts marching to this last March
Frost, not all the suns flaming to August
The last, dry-dried her spirit to adust;
She her own frost and sun at last must
Fetch- to blaze within and her soul's spirit parch
Into a desert- her own contracted flame ;
Her radical sin, this sin at last to tame.
May she like the fathers by the desert broken
In her own desert find at last salvation.
Wilfred Watson
DUMB DICK
This fugue must be hummed, found
As the wind fumbles, all thumbs.
What drops toward the furred stones,
Founders? Here
is
a hole in the wind ;
