Daughters of War

Space beats the ruddy freedom of their limbs,Their naked dances with man’s spirit nakedBy the root side of the tree of life(The under side of thingsAnd shut from earth’s profoundest eyes).

I saw in prophetic gleamsThese mighty daughters in their dancesBeckon each soul aghast from its crimson corpseTo mix in their glittering dances:I heard the mighty daughters’ giant sighsIn sleepless passion for the sons of valourAnd envy of the days of flesh,Barring their love with mortal boughs across—The mortal boughs, the mortal tree of life.The old bark burnt with iron warsThey blow to a live flameTo char the young green daysAnd reach the occult soul; they have no softer lure,No softer lure than the savage ways of death.

We were satisfied of our lords the moon and the sunTo take our wage of sleep and bread and warmth—These maidens came—these strong everliving Amazons,And in an easy might their wristsOf night’s sway and noon’s sway the sceptres brake,Clouding the wild, the soft lustres of our eyes.

Clouding the wild lustres, the clinging tender lights;Driving the darkness into the flame of dayWith the Amazonian wind of themOver our corroding facesThat must be broken—broken for evermore,So the soul can leap outInto their huge embraces.Though there are human facesBest sculptures of Deity,And sinews lusted afterBy the Archangels tall,Even these must leap to the love-heat of these maidensFrom the flame of terrene days,Leaving grey ashes to the wind—to the wind.

One (whose great lifted face,Where wisdom’s strength and beauty’s strengthAnd the thewed strength of large beastsMoved and merged, gloomed and lit)Was speaking, surely, as the earth-men’s earth fell away;Whose new hearing drank the soundWhere pictures, lutes, and mountains mixedWith the loosed spirit of a thought,Essenced to language thus—

“My sisters force their malesFrom the doomed earth, from the doomed gleeAnd hankering of hearts.Frail hands gleam up through the human quagmire, and lips of ashSeem to wail, as in sad faded paintingsFar-sunken and strange.My sisters have their malesClean of the dust of old daysThat clings about those white handsAnd yearns in those voices sad:But these shall not see them,Or think of them in any days or years;They are my sisters’ lovers in other days and years.”