On Sunday Morn.

While the guns are rumbling, fitful, out in front,
And the snipers' whips are cracking to the Day,
All the world's alaze in Lome on Sunday morn,
All adream in dew, ten thousand miles away;
And the little streets that vein the drowsing town
Are asprawl in restive sun and shadow flakes,
And the birds are trilling out their dawn-drunk souls,
Ere that world of worlds of mine, back there, awakes.

And the surf is booming, gunlike, on the beach,
And the idle sails are sniping on their posts,
And the silent pier is smoking in the spray,
As the warring seas send in the white-plumed hosts;
And the tolling of a bell, across the surge,
Calls the Peace of early tenders from its shrine
To my straining ears, far-wrung in sadness here,
For the hopeless dreams they'd fetch this soul of mine.

For the years in front are rumbling with the guns,
And the years behind are lost on rifle-crack,
And the world of miles that lies their folds between
Has a world of mem'ry-wraiths to tide them back;
And the smoke of vanished hoof-beats on the road,
And the crackling of the pines in old bush-fires,
Are adrift beneath the smoking hoofs of Death,
And the roaring tongues of Battle's ghastly pyres.

Palestine. "Brentomnan."