The Diggers
The diggers are digging, and digging deep,
They’re digging and singing,
And I’m asleep.
They’re digging and singing and swiftly they’re swinging
The flying earth as it falls in a heap.
And some of it scatters and falls on my head;
But the diggers dig on. They can only dig.
They can only sing and their eyes are big,
Their eyes are big and heavy as lead.
They dig and they sing and they think I’m dead
The diggers are digging, and filling the hole.
They’re sighing and singing.
They pray for my soul.
I hear what they say, and from where I am lying,
I hear a new corporal calling the roll.
But the diggers dig on and fill in my bed,
They diggers dig on, and they sweat and they sweat.
They sigh and they sign, and their wyes are wet.
The brown earth clatters and covers my head;
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poem by Leon Gellert
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Mockery
I met my love a-weeping,
Weeping in the night-tide pale;
Her head among the lily bloom,
Weeping by an empty tomb—
An unshut tomb.
I gently stroked her golden hair
That shone so
With the moon-glow
In the sad-sweet air.
Like playful breezes from the south
Came soft smile-dimples to her mouth;
And when again she seemed to weep
I kissed her wild-wide eyes to sleep;
While there beyond the lily bloom
I saw the watching, waiting tomb.
I left my love a-sleeping,
Sleeping in the cypress vale;
Smiling sadly in the gloom;
Sleeping in the fastened tomb—
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poem by Leon Gellert
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The Last to Leave
The guns were silent, and the silent hills
had bowed their grasses to a gentle breeze
I gazed upon the vales and on the rills,
And whispered, "What of these?' and "What of these?
These long forgotten dead with sunken graves,
Some crossless, with unwritten memories
Their only mourners are the moaning waves,
Their only minstrels are the singing trees
And thus I mused and sorrowed wistfully
I watched the place where they had scaled the height,
The height whereon they bled so bitterly
Throughout each day and through each blistered night
I sat there long, and listened - all things listened too
I heard the epics of a thousand trees,
A thousand waves I heard; and then I knew
The waves were very old, the trees were wise:
The dead would be remembered evermore-
The valiant dead that gazed upon the skies,
And slept in great battalions by the shore.
poem by Leon Gellert
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The Hawk
Swoop! Swoop!
From dizzy skies thou singest
To the shining earth.
To where unseen
Amid the green
Untimely death thou bringest
To unseeing mirth.
Upon a dark crag peering
Through half-eclipsed eye,
An eye unkind,
Dost meet the wind
With lifted head all-hearing
In the algid sky.
What awful thought is sitting
In thy brain and breast,
That beats thy blood
With throbbing flood,
When linnets come night-flitting
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poem by Leon Gellert
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The Soul Forsaken
Head-bowed I stood before the Gates of
God,
And pleaded starvingly;
The Great Eye would not see;
And cold with hopeless tears again I trod
The dreaded vast.
I felt the souls immortal moving past
All singingly.
Oh, pity me! Oh, pity me!
Wandering eternally!
I moved among Olympic ways amoan,
And looked with searching eye
Upon the mournful sky.
I lay and wept before the crumbled throne
Of Jove the dead.
I heard the soundless twilight, and I fled
With hopeless sign.
Oh, pity me! Oh, pity me!
Wandering eternally!
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poem by Leon Gellert
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Dreamlight
Oh, I am lonely by a desert palm,
And dreaming, dreaming on the sands of thought
Oh, come to me from out the voiceless calm,
And teach me what the Nile has left untaught.
Bring to me a draught of Southern wine,
The perfume of the near-forgotten rose.
Then let me drink beside some ancient shrine,
And drinking, let my tired eyelids close.
Come near to me. The fast night-hours are few,
For every hour is fast when moons are clear.
Scatter from my hair the desert dew,
And lilt sweet Arab love-songs in my ear.
Unloose the twilight hair about thy head,
And listen to the waters deep and slow
For we are dreaming with the dreaming dead,
Dreaming where the flowers of Isis blow.
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poem by Leon Gellert
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Dejection
Point thy battered prow to the dark shore
Thou hoary son of Erebus, and dip thy blades
In the slow-moving marge, for I am of the
shades,
And I would see the mocking earth no more.
Welcome is to me that starless dome
That echoes of the dead, and the black Stygian
flood
That laps upon its strand like drowsy blood.
Oh, bear me slow to my Avernian home!
Oh, bear me with slow-metered melody,
And wield thine oars in tune to some Plutonian lay;
For I would be with shadows and forget the day
To roam the dark aisles with Persephone.
Guide me to the banks of some still stream
To pluck the frail narcissus buds where’er I may;
Or let me muse along some cypress-shaded way,
And ponder on the glories of a dream.
Then would I wander in those murky glades,
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poem by Leon Gellert
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Bluebeard’s First Wife
I lie by the garden wall,
Buried and all alone;
The brown camellias fall
One by one on the stone.
Buried and all alone,
Because I had loved the sky!
One by one on the stone
The blossoms shudder and die.
Because I had loved the sky—
The dark blue face of the sea!
(The blossoms shudder and die)
He murdered me at his knee.
The dark, blue face of the sea.
Nothing so dark as the tomb!
He murdered me at his knee.
I knew the truth of the room!
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poem by Leon Gellert
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The Wrecked Aeroplane
Unhappy craft of Daedalus reborn,
That liest prone with white wings torn,
And, like some giant prehistoric bird, with throb-
bing sound
Doest beat they wings on unresponsive ground.
Forlorn! Forlorn!
This very morn didst set out with thy plume
Yet damp from thine Icarian tomb,
To plough in mirth again the Stygian wave. With
launching cry
And sails outset didst dive the unattempted sky
To doom! To doom!
The early reaper at the start of day
Pauses ‘mid the falling hay,
And stands in wond’ring gaze, with eyes upturned
to watch they flight;
To him dost seem some goblin that the lifting nigh
Hath gone astray.
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poem by Leon Gellert
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Lemnos Harbour
The island sleeps,-but it has no delight
For em, to whom that sleep has been unkind.
My thoughts are long of what seems long ago,
And long, too, are my dreams. I do not know
These trailing glories of the star-strewn night
Or the slow sough of the wind.
I hear the rattle of the moving car;
The children crying in the lighted street,
I walk along the same old asphalt way.
I see the church,-I hear the organ play.
I see the hills I wandered on afar,
And spots of rain at my feet.
I see the dust-strewn hedge,-the latched gate;
The gravelled path with roses either side;
The cedar tree,-my mother’s window pane.
I see the place where I sat long and late
By the trellis deep and wide.
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poem by Leon Gellert
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