Portrait

We are a pale generation

With willow-withe spines

And anemic blood

Needing the transfusion of courage.

We are the "God's in His Heaven" people

Who linger in the miraged oasis

Rather than ride the imperiled

With the black-cowled horseman of doom to ask:

"What has become of the hot,

Red blood of your sires

With the unbending straightness of pines

Who answered to the challenge-call

Of the conquering lion

Rather than to the soft purring

Of the Machiavellian?"

It Is a Tragic Thing

Man is drunken
Yet thirsting still for stronger potions.
The wines of milder vintage
Mellowed by love and beauty
Cannot intoxicate the mind that has tasted
The liquor of its own inverted power.

Mind is master;
Yet eyes dimmed by cataracts of greed
Can see no signposts of the Master Mind
Nor torches of the avatars
That flame disaster;
Ears tuned only to earthly kingdoms
Hear not the guiding carillons of angels.

Ceaselessly, triumphantly,
With merciless, sword-thin laughter,
Man builds his slaves--
Robots with the strength of Atlas
Purring annihilation
Forgetting that he, himself,
May be food for his own mind's gorging.

It is a tragic thing
When man lights the fuse
Of the bomb that will level his own house.
Would he but look up,
He might walk with Gods and travel by star
To the kingdoms of forever.

The Relief Society Magazine
Second in MFCP Clinic Poems, Spring 1953