Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, CRISIS, by CALE YOUNG RICE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

CRISIS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Has life no seer, who, with enthralled throat
Last Line: Shall never again darken us with its woe.
Subject(s): Dreams; Fear; Life; Time; U.s. - History; World War Ii; Nightmares; Second World War


I

Has life no seer, who, with enthralled throat
Swept by the fusing fire of inspiration,
Can sound humanity's sore-needed note,
And with a Word weld nation to nation
In a great Dream of Unity so strong
That all the wild strangling nightmare throng
Of War's myriad inhumanities,
Too often bred of a misbegotten peace,
Shall never again enslave us with their wrong?

Or if no single voice is mighty enough
To say the Word -- since Christ has pled in vain --
Will not the nations, travailing in pain
Toward the birth of a new age that calls,
Themselves grave the commandments that will break
The bitter barriers each is forced to make
In fear -- only to find that it has willed
Its own destruction by distrustful walls?

II

Surely upon the firmament we face
A new world-healing Gospel must be graven,
And the first tenet of it should efface
Fear's evil, by an inexorable ban
Upon the severance of any race
From nurture-rights at earth's impartial breast,
Or from being impent in a soul-space
Too narrow for its higher needs or quest.

Surely it must -- in letters above the reach
Of any erosive evil or decay!
Else even Faith itself, wasted away,
Will be dissolved in the menstruum of change,
Till doubting we are ordained ever to range
The evolving centuries intrepidly
We merely stand sterilely asking Why:
Or Whether, since like flies we breed upon
A planet so indifferent to our birth,
Each should consider more than his own worth,
Or fight for more than he must keep or die.

III

With so much to be gained, by the engravure,
We cannot let Time, fazed and profligate,
Forever weakly die intestate thus,
Leaving no will dividing his domain
Among us to secure our future peace,
But only disputing continents accursed
With sick confusion, each fearing the worst
And finding it -- without hope of release
From dark blood-brother greeds and enmities.
We cannot let such boundless bondage be,
Unless we are too doltish to be free!

For life has in it a Power that does not want
This cruel chaos we have wallowed in --
A Power we must believe while disbelieving,
One that will never cease sternly to haunt
Our hearts toward growths higher than our conceiving.
One we can never escape by any weaving
Of sophistry or selfish sloth alone,
Since it is flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone.

And despots who would deny or change this law
Of mystic growth in us rise but to fall;
Not one will ever have the might to awe
Us long into believing we must crawl
Unbuoyed by any divine aid at all.

For the strong urge to grasp a dream and grow
Is the one Providence we cannot doubt;
That from the ooze has lifted us, far out
Of our primeval past, and that, we know,
Will lift us still toward the ultimate hour
Of Victory -- when need to call aloud
For a fierce irrepealable decree
To lay War sheathed forever in a shroud
Shall never again darken us with its woe.





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