WIDOWS

The world was widowed by the death of Christ:

Vainly its suffering soul for peace has sought

And found it not.

For nothing, nothing, nothing has sufficed

To bring back comfort to the stricken house

From whence has gone the Master and the Spouse.

In its long widowhood the world has striven

To find diversion. It has turned away

From the vast aweful silences of Heaven

( Which answer but with silence when we pray )

And sought for something to assuage its grief.

Some surcease and relief

From sorrow, in pursuit of mortal joys.

It drowned God's stillness in a sea of noise;

It lost God's presence in a blur of forms;

Till, bruised and bleeding with life's brutal storms,

Unto immutable and speechless space

The World lifts up its face,

Its haggard, tear-drenched face,

And cries aloud for faith's supreme reward,

The promised Second Coming of its Lord.

So many widows, widows everywhere,

The whole earth teems with widows. Guns that blare -

Winged monsters of the air -

And deep-sea monsters leaping through the water,

Hell bent on slaughter,

All these plough paths for widows. Maids at dawn,

And brides at noon, ere eventide pass on

Into the ranks of widows: but to weep

Just for a little space; then will grief sleep

In their young bosoms, where sweet hope belongs,

New love will sing once more its age-old songs,

And life bloom as a rose-tree blooms again

After a night of rain.

There are complacent widows clothed in crepe

Who simulate a grief that is not real.

Through paths of seeming sorrow they escape

From disappointed hopes to some ideal,

Or, from the penury of unloved wives

Walk forth to opulent lives.

And there are widows who shed all their tears

Just at the first

In one wild burst,

And then go lilting lightly down the years:

Black butterflies, they flit from flower to flower

And live in the thin pleasures of the hour;

Merging their tender memories of the dead

In tenderer dreams of being once more wed.

But there are others: women who have proved

That loving greatly means so being loved.

Women who through full beauteous years have grown

Into the very body, souls, and heart

Of their dear comrades. When death tears apart

Such close-knit bonds as these, and one alone

Out to the larger freer life is called,

And one is left -

Then God in heaven must sometimes be appalled

At the wild anguish of the soul bereft,

And unto His Son must say,‘ I did not know

Mortals could suffer so.’

But Christ, remembering Gethsemane,

Will answer softly,‘ It was known to Me.’

God's alchemist, old Time, will merge to calm

That bitter anguish; but there is no balm

Save the sweet certitude that each long day

Is one step in a stair

That circles up to where freed spirits stay.

Widows, so many widows everywhere.

The world was widowed by the death of Christ,

And nothing, nothing, nothing has sufficed

To bring back comfort to the stricken house

From whence has gone the Master and the Spouse.

Hasten, dear Lord, with Thy Millennium, Hasten and come.