Humility

VOL. XVIII

etry No. ¥

A Magazine of Verse

AUGUST 1921

GROWTH

ADVENT

Ot of a silence greater than all words;

Over the unspeakable, dumb,

Everlasting hills

With their muter herds;

Swifter than a blade that kills;

Mightier than prayer;

Fairer than the dawn

When some dew yet remains unbroken;

Stronger than despair;

From the unspoken to the spoken,

While the heart rests momently;

Lovely as the half-uttered words of a child,

More delicate, more mild;

Terrible as the torn breasts of anguish

When strong wills languish:

Suddenly, dreadfully, exquisitely,

Love, death, and God shall come.

SOWN

Rain and the patience of the planted field,

Grey skies that hasten to the need

Of brown moistening earth, and to the sealed

Faint harvest in the unbroken seed-

Patience for waiting give us! O planted men,

Who waits your budding and your heaped

Flowers of death? Again, again

Perhaps ye shall return-the reapers, not the reaped-

And, braver than corn-seed hid away together,

Of our meagre or our mighty yield

Shall wake for the gathering in harvest weather.

TO EARTH

Oh, fortunate the waiting that shall end in wonder,

And blessed now the patience that is in thy biding;

For now are the herded clouds and the wild rain's thunder

Over the roof of thy quiet seeds' hiding.

We too, O earth, shall need thy blessedness of waiting

For the green flowering of pastures, when the panting

Storm shall cease; though blood be the rain that is abating,

And men be the seeds of our wild planting.

Charles R. Murphy

WINTER

Now are ye lean, O trees, and shaped for soaring

Over the sacred snow that hides the land;

Now after stress of bitter storms endured

On the spent earth unmutinous ye stand.

Only your faces now are turned not earthward,

However deep your roots are clasped there.

With the gaunt gesture of a saint's uprising,

Ye are the resurrection that is prayer.

SPRING

Trees have a gesture of departure,

Yet forever stay;

Into what eager land they'd travel

No man may say.

In the spring they stand on tip-toe;

Yet, self-willed, remain

In autumn to let earthward

Their hopes like rain.

Yet forever a new spring cometh,

And their muteness swells

To the voice of one long risen

For long farewells;

Who with steps of eternal patience,

In eternal quest,

Open the doors of temples, scorn

Their veils! Yet in the flight of bird on sea,

In the fall of leaf from tree,

In the green patient spears of grain, in the torn

Sides of mountains where some verdure clings-

In all these things-

We have enough to brood on till we be

Ready and humble as the corn.