Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LEGION STREET, by CHARLES HENRY MACKINTOSH


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LEGION STREET, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: These are the common sounds of legion street
Last Line: To be reborn in every son of man.
Subject(s): Religion; Theology


These are the common sounds of Legion Street:
A shout, a curse, a catch of drunken song,
The angry clamor of a distant gong,
A sound of sobbing in some dim retreat.
Ghosts of stale lusts and dead ambitions meet
As in a mirror here, and move along
Without contempt or envy. Neither wrong
Nor right is here, but darkness and defeat.

Death knows this street, and he is welcome here.
His scythe can sever knots none could untie;
And even those who know not what they fear
May fear to live more than they fear to die.
But life, too, comes to Legion Street, and clear
Above its clamor rises the birth-cry.

Hear now that cry. The day has not begun.
The street lies dreaming, babbling of desire.
Hear how the cry mounts over roof and spire,
Above the moon, the planets, and the sun,
Piercing the stellar spirals one by one,
Through nebulae and the galactic gyre
Of all the universes of faint fire
With which the web of time and space is spun.

No other sounds from Legion Street profane
The lofty silences of hyperspace.
No shout of anger, and no sob of pain,
No wail of weariness, or of disgrace.
Only the cry that man is born again
Rises triumphant to this timeless place.

In Legion Street, the loveliness of dawn
Remakes with magic all that men have made.
Old crumbling concrete walls are overlaid
With pastel tints of ivory and fawn.
Corrodel metal, blackened and forlorn,
Becomes bright gold of a rich roseate shade.
Blind windows open eyes of jewel jade,
As, into Legion Street, a son is born.

The magic of the morning melts to gray,
For Legion Street is anything but fair.
Just for a moment, between dark and day,
A phantom loveliness has lingered there,
As if it were to decorate the way
For the triumphal entry of an heir.

There is no beauty in the attic room
Where an old midwife, cursing at the cold,
Fumbles to free the ingot from the mold.
The grimy window-glass sustains a gloom
Almost as deep as that within the womb.
Here are no angels, nor wise men and old
With gifts of myrrh and frankincense and gold.
Here is no glory, but a sense of doom.

Doom is indeed the donor of the gift
Caught in the casket of this crumpled bed.
No suns so distant, and no stars so swift,
But base their orbits on this tiny head,
Wherein the ends of evolution lift
A challenge to the future, from the dead.

Here is an heir apparent to the throne
Of conscious life. -- How many million years
Of blind up-groping out of formless fears
And fearful forms of brutish blood and bone
Are concentrated in this form alone.
Here is the love and laughter, toil and tears,
The arts and crafts, the wisdom of the seers,
The science, of the Steel Age, and the Stone.

How strangely, and how slowly, and how far,
The evolution of our human kind
On this third planet of a minor star
Has molded, modulated, and refined
An instrument to call this avatar
Out of the void of universal mind.

Out of the Night of God, silent and still,
Where never light was seen, nor sound was heard,
The need for self-awareness spoke the Word,
Sending a vast and vibratory thrill
Throughout the cosmos of non-conscious Will.
Then was the ocean of sensation stirred,
Senses emerged, and consciousness occurred,
And reason knew what wisdom shall fulfill.

Children of God, who walk with bleeding feet,
The living bridge lifting its rainbow span
Out of the dark of the divine retreat
Into the day of the perfected plan:
Know, it is God who comes to Legion Street,
To be reborn in every son of man.




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