THE LAST CREW

Spring found us early that eventful year,

Seeming to know in her clairvoyant way

The bitterness of hunger and despair

That lay upon the town.

Out of the sheer

Thin altitudes of day

She drifted down

Over the grim blockade

At the harbor mouth,

Trailing her beauty over the decay

That war had made,

Gilding old ruins with her jasmine spray,

Distilling warm moist perfume

From chill winter shade.

Out of the south

She brought the whisperings

Of questing wings.

Then, flame on flame,

The cardinals came,

Blowing like driven brands

Up from the sultry lands

Where Summer's happy fires always burn.

Old silences, that pain

Had held too close and long,

Stirred to the mocker's song,

And hope looked out again

From tired eyes.

Down where the White Point Gardens drank the sun,

And rippled to the lift of springing grass,

The women came;

And after them the aged, and the lame

That war had hurled back at them like a taunt.

And always, as they talked of little things,

How violets were purpling the shade

More early than in all remembered Springs,

And how the tides seemed higher than last year,

Their gaze went drifting out across the bay

To where,

Thrusting out of the mists,

Like hostile fists,

Waited the close blockade —

Then, dim to left and right,

The curving islands with their shattered mounds

That had been forts;

Mounds, which in spite

Of four long years of rending agony

Still held against the light;

Faint wraiths of color

For the breeze to lift

And flatten into faded red and white.

These sunny islands were not meant for wars;

See, how they curve away

Before the bay,

Bidding the voyager pause.

Warm with the hoarded suns of centuries,

Young with the garnered youth of many Springs,

They laugh like happy bathers, while the seas

Break in their open arms,

And the slow-moving breeze

Draws languid fingers down their placid brows.

Even the surly ocean knows their charms,

And under the shrill laughter of the surf,

He booms and sings his heavy monotone.