Nostalgia

Morning and memory wake me together
When night is yet holding the laggards in sleep;
I walk through the dew in the warm summer weather,
Through pastures where succulent grasses are deep
And horses are waiting the slavery of leather.
The silence is broken. A cow's restless lowing
Betrays her a pagan who worships no dawn
And bows to no God but the need of milk flowing
For one wayward calf to build sustenance on
And find in the dawning the need to keep growing.
Too many mornings are barren and groping,
Worship is bludgeoned and harnessed to greed;
But prisms of dew with a pale ghost is coping
To waken a dream. There is pain in the need
Of morning and pastures where horses are loping.

LELA HIGDAY.

Forever

I never knew exactly what it meant
To say forever and forever while
You lived, but now I know- now since you went
From me. Forever is mile after mile
Of space, impassable, uncharted: it
Is time beyond the count and scope of mind;
A rack on which all tortured souls submit;
A prison with sealed doors; steel chains that bind.
Forever is from when you died until
I go. Forever is the thing graves know.
Forever is the life, the years, you will
Not live. Forever is a word for woe.
I say forever and forever and
There are no words I better understand.

FRANCES WHITE

Wild Barley

Ah, but men do remember her,
With a quickening pulse. . .
Whenever they kiss their austere loves
Whose mild lips are but an icy lance
To one who has loved this woman.
She was wild barley in the wind!
The earth sang and the moon was a bright drum
Of heady rhythm;
Beating. . . beating with Eve curved throb of Eden
Muted to pale languor, pale as magnolia bloom
Heavy with perfumed rapture.
Men shall remember her with secret longing
Deep as life. . . remember the lure of her vibrant throat
And her laughter.
There is never enough of that, nor of the way
Soft fingers can riffle a man's calm
And measure the chord of passion.
Briar and thorn were as plush in her arms.
Yet, she sleeps in the potters field.
Not that it matters. . . fields are fields,
Whether they be cut swards or . . . barley waving.

MURIEL JEFFRIES HURD.

The Fan

Dear weapon of grace,
In ivory and lace,
How archly you veiled our intentions.
With you, coy fan,
We captured our man
When girls were submerged in conventions.
You parried and swayed
The night that gay blade
With such daring technique hovered near you,
What was it he said
About lips that were red?
Shush, don't let my granddaughter hear you.

Dm.J,A PARRENT CLARK.

The Gentle Days

Now comes the heat of summer on soft feet,
Slipping through the trees
On little shafts of sunlight to the beat
Of insect symphonies.
Soft winds stroll too
Languidly through
The gentle days
The days when earth's serenities
Walk golden ways;
When clouds float in a tranquil mist;
And morning-glories, prejudiced
Against the heat, curl up, withdrawn
To wait a new and cooler dawn.
These days were made with golden hours
For wise surcease
From hectic Time; their quiet empowers
The soul with peace.

MARY B. WARD.

Mary White

The Associated Press reports carrying the news of Mary White's death declared that it came as the result of a fall from a horse. How she would have hooted at that! She never fell from a horse in her life. Horses have fallen on her and with her. "I'm always trying to hold 'em in my lap," she used to say. But she was proud of few things, and one was that she could ride anything that had four legs and hair. Her death resulted not from a fall, but from a blow on the head which fractured her skull, and the blow came from the limb of an overhanging tree on the parking.

The last hour of her life was typical of its happiness. She came home from a day's work at school, topped off by a hard grind with the copy on the High School Annual, and felt that a ride would refresh her. She climbed into her khakis, chattering to her mother about the work she was doing, and hurried to get her horse and be out on the dirt roads for the country air and the radiant green fields of the spring. As she rode through the town on an easy gallop, she kept waving at passers-by. She knew everyone in town. For a decade the little figure with the long pig-tail and the red hair-ribbon has been familiar on the streets of Emporia, and she got in the way of speaking to those who nodded at her.

She passed the Kerrs-walking the horse-in front of the Normal Library, and waved at them; passed another friend a few hundred feet further on, and waved at her. The horse was walking and, as she turned into North Merchant Street, she took off her cowboy hat, and the horse swung into a lope. She passed the Tripletts and waved her cowboy hat at them, still moving gayly north on Merchant Street. A Gazette carrier passed- a High School boy friend- and she waved at him, but with her bridle hand; the horse veered quickly, plunged into the parking where the low-hanging limb faced her, and, while she still looked back waving, the blow came. But she did not fall from the horse; she slipped off, dazed a bit, staggered, and fell in a faint. She never quite recovered consciousness.

But she did not fall from the horse, neither was she riding fast. A year or so ago she used to go like the wind. But that habit was broken, and she used the horse to get into the open to get fresh, hard exercise and to work off a certain surplus energy that welled up in her and needed a physical outlet. That need has been in her heart for years. It was back of the impulse that kept the dauntless little brownclad figure on the streets and country roads of this community and built into a strong, muscular body what had been a frail and sickly frame during the first years of her life. But the riding gave her more than a body. It released a gay and hardy soul. She was the happiest thing in the world. And she was happy because she was enlarging her horizon.

She came to know all sorts and conditions of men; Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, was one of her best friends. W. L. Holtz, the Latin teacher, was another. Tom O'Connor, farmer-politician, and Rev. J. H. J. Rice, preacher and police judge, and Frank Beach, music master, were her special friends, and all the girls, black and white, above the track and below the track, in Pepville and Stringtown, were among her acquaintances. And she brought home riotous stories of her adventures. She loved to rollick; persiflage was her natural expression at home. Her humor was a continual bubble of joy. She seemed to think in hyperbole and metaphor. She was mischievous without malice, and full of faults as an old shoe. No angel was Mary White, but an easy girl to live with, for she never nursed a grouch five minutes in her life.

With all her eagerness for the out-of-doors, she loved books. On her table when she left her room, were a book by Conrad, one by Galsworthy, Creative Chemistry, by E. E. Slosson, and Kipling book. She read Mark Twain, Dickens, and Kipling before she was ten- all of their writings. Wells and Arnold Bennett particularly amused and diverted her. She was entered as a student in Wellesley in 1922; was assistant editor of the High School Annual this year, and in line for election to the editorship of the Annual next year.

She was a member of the executive committee of the High School Y.W.C.A. Within the last two years she had begun to be moved by an ambition to draw. She began as most children do by scribbling in her schoolbooks, funny pictures. She bought cartoon magazines and a took a course rather casually, naturally; for she was, after all, a child with no strong purposes- and this year she tasted the first fruits of success by having her pictures accepted by the High School Annual.

But the thrill of delight she got when Mr. Ecord, of the Normal Annual, asked her to do the cartooning for that book this spring was too beautiful for words. She fell to her work with all her enthusiastic heart. Her drawings were accepted, and her pride- always repressed by a lively sense of the ridiculousness of the figure she was cutting- was a really gorgeous thing to see. No successful artist ever drank a deeper draft of satisfaction than she took from the little fame her work was getting among her schoolfellows. In her glory she almost forgot her horse- but never her car.

For she used the car as a jitney bus, it was her social life. She never had a "party" in all her nearly seventeen years, wouldn't have one, but she never drove a block in the car in her life that she didn't begin to fill the car with pick-ups!

Everybody rode with Mary White-white and black, old and young, rich and poor, men and women. She liked nothing better than to fill the car full of long-legged High School boys and an occasional girl, and parade the town. She never had a "date," nor went to a dance, except once with her brother Bill, and the "boy proposition" didn't interest her yet. But young people, great spring-breaking, varnish cracking, fender-bending, door-sagging carloads of  "kids," gave her great pleasure.

Her zests were keen. But the most fun she ever had in her life was acting as chairman of the committee that got up the big turkey dinner for the poor folks at the county home; scores pf pies, gallons of slaw, jam, cakes, preserves, oranges, and a wilderness of turkey were loaded in the car and taken to the county home. And, being of a practical turn of mind, she risked her own Christmas dinner by staying to see that the poor folks actually got it all. Not that she was a cynic; she just disliked to tempt folks. While there she found a blind colored uncle, very old, who could do nothing but make rag rugs, and she rustled up from her school friends rags enough to keep him busy for a season.

The last engagement she tried to make was to take the guests at the county home out for a car ride. And the last endeavor of her life was to try to get a rest room for colored girls in the High School. She found one girl reading in the toilet, because there was no better place for a colored girl to loaf, and it inflamed her sense of injustice, and she became a nagging harpie to those who, she thought, could remedy the evil. The poor she had always with her, and was glad of it. She hungered and thirsted for righteousness; and was the most impious creature in the world. She joined the Congregational Church without consulting her parents; not particularly for her soul's good. She never had a thrill of piety in her life, and would have hooted at "testi¬mony." But even as a little child she felt the church was an agency for helping people to more of life's abundance, and she wanted to help.

She never wanted help for herself. Clothes meant little to her. It was a fight to get a new ring on her; but eventually a harder fight to get it off. She never wore a jewel and had no ring but her High School class ring, and never asked for anything but a wrist watch. She refused to have her hair up, though she was nearly seventeen. "Mother," she protested, "you don't know how much I get by with, in my braided pigtails, that I could not with my hair up." Above every other passion of her life was her passion not to grow up, to be a child. The tomboy in her, which was big, seemed to loathe to be put away forever in skirts. She was a Peter Pan, who refused to grow up.

Her funeral yesterday at the Congregational Church was as she would have wished it; no singing, no flowers save the big bunch of red roses from her brother Bill's Harvard classmen - heavens, how proud that would have made her- and the red roses from the Gazette force in vases at her head and feet. A short prayer, Paul's beautiful essay on "Love" from the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians, some remarks about her democratic spirit by her friend, John H. J. Rice, pastor and police judge, which she would have deprecated if she could, a prayer sent down for her by her friend, Carl Nau, and opening the service the slow, poignant movement from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which she loved, and closing the service a cutting from the joyously melancholy first movement of Tschaikowski's Pathetic Symphony, which she liked to hear in certain moods on the phonograph; then the Lord's Prayer by her friends in the High School. That was all.

For her pall-bearers only her friends were chosen; her Latin teacher, W. L. Holtz; her High School principal, Rice Brown; her doctor, Frank Fonconnon; her friend, W. W. Finney; her pal at the Gazette office, Walter Hughes; and her brother Bill. It would have made her smile to know that her friend Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, had been transferred from Sixth and Commercial to the corner near the church to direct her friends who came to bid her good-by.

A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of sunlight upon her coffin as her nervous energetic little body sank to its last sleep. But the soul of her, the glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn.

WILLIAM ALLEN WRITE

At Sunrise

They pushed him straight against the wall;
The firing squad dropped in a row,
And why he raised upon his toes,
Those men shall never know.
He wore a smile across his face
As he stood trimly there,
The guns all aiming at his heart,
The sun upon his hair.
For he remembered in a flash
Those days now past recall,
When his proud mother took his height
Against the bedroom wall.

ROSA ZAGNONI MARINONI.

The Sweetheart of Juan Flores

Grizzled old Martina slouches in the sun,
Wrapped in her rebosa, now her day is done.
Begging at the Mission with her black dress on,
What can she remember of the bandit Juan?
Dusky young Juan Flores with the evil eyes,
Riding on a pilfered horse, carbine at his thighs.
Shots- beyond EI Toro at Capistrano Town,
Dying men who stumbled, blood upon her gown
¬Indian Martina, when the moon is bright
Hears across the Plaza a rider in the night
Halt at her adobe-Ah, never more his tread
Who met a grim riata, looped and stained with red.

BEULAH MAY.

Greenwich Village

The days were cold
And wood was scarce,
And we without a penny
We burned the chairs
And shower doors
And were as gay as any.
We fed on bread,
Italian wine,
And many a potato,
While we discussed
The wisdom of
Confucius, Freud and Plato.
And life was lean
And beautiful
And love was young and glad
It's good to be
A Village poet
And a little mad.

WILMA CRITTENDEN.

Knocking

The only fault of Reuben Brown
Was knocking aged old spinsters down.
He loved to hear their timid squeal,
And see their look of soft appeal;
And wept with joy to watch them flutter,
On muddy mornings in the gutter.
And in this not unhealthy pleasure
He spent his frequent hours of leisure
Till came a day when Spinster Fate
Decided to retaliate.
A lady sauntered close ahead:
He caught her up with wary tread,
And sent her sprawling on the earth.
His eyes grew dim with tears of mirth.
They cleared; and there before him lay,
Among wet leaves and liquid clay,
The richest of the rich relations
On whom he based his expectations,
His Aunt! She turned, she saw, she knew!
In blind and nervous haste he flew,
And slipped beneath a passing bus:
His death was instantaneous.
Two morals, Reader, here are shown.
"Don't knock a lady down" is one;
The next, if you'd avoid a shock,
Is simply: "Look before you knock."

GEORGE V AN RAALTE.

Grass

Man cuts down the tall green spears
And trims them to his smallest whim;
He mows them down and plucks them out
Mercilessly, with his strong pointed tools.
Whenever a thin green blade lifts its head
He conquers it with one ruthless stroke.
Man is master of the soil and grass
Is but a cringing helpless slave;
But when Man puts away his tools
And shuts his eyes, the green grass creeps
Out once again and takes revenge
By covering him beneath the soil and
Climbing gleefully over his face and hands.

RUTH ROGERs.

Plunder

Fossicking around
In the dictionary,
Words may be found
Fit for a l'aree.
Orpiment, ore,
Varvel and gibble's,
Zizany, tore,
Dimity, fribbles.
Quaint, if inept,
Odd bits from babel,
Like old things kept
On grandma's table.

JACK HORNER.

New Song For Memorial Day

We are the dead, who are not laid away,
For whom no flowers deck the quiet grave.
You passed us in the crowded street today;
Thinking of those gone back to earth, you gave
No second glance. We are the dead, who died
Not with one kind abandonment of breath,
Sudden and merciful; but dreams denied
And slow frustration worked a living death.
You will lay blossoms on a sunny slope
For those called dead, who cannot need them now;
And we shall take the subway with you, grope
Ever so slightly for your thought; then bow
The head again, and face the empty years
Dead without grace of tribute, or of tears.

HELEN FRAZEE-BoWER.

Worm'll Turn

He thinks I didn't hear that nasty crack.
He'll he surprised when it comes back
To him one day, with lawful force
¬The day I apply for a divorce.

B. V. KINDLER.

A Censor

Day in, day out upon his classic quest;

He haunts the book stores one by one to scan
Page after page assiduously, lest
Some doubtful volume should escape his ban.
He thumbs the classics over, fondly lingers
On Richardson and Sterne and Rabelais
And turns their pages with excited fingers
He'd censor Scripture if he had his way.
A few books he takes home for late inspection
Long after dark when good folk are in bed.
A dozen moderns of his own selection
Contribute thrills by which his mind is fed.
On his chaste brow, then, let us twine the laurels
Due him for elevating public morals!

SYDNEY KING RUSSELL.

Wish For A Lover

May he be gentle, yet may he be strong
To bear all wind and rain against his cheek,
Eager to battle what he knows is wrong,
Yet slow to anger, and, in self-praise, meek.
May he be beauty-loving, turning back
To hear one bird again, or find one flower,
And may he be a dreamer, yet not lack
Stamina for an unforeseen dark hour.
May he know intimately deep, kind laughter,
May he have working hands, and eyes that say
All he cannot. . . May he be tolerant after
He learns how much I love him, some far day.

ELAINE V. EMANS.

... --- ... --- … --- …

GUGLIELMO MARCONI
Earth marvels yet! What height his rapture when
He caught C Q sent through infinite space,
Which drew him from this multitude of men!
Did he who conquered ether-silence-trace
Immeasurable orbits, planet-known,
To give his answer somewhere, face to face?
He was a gracious gift, who had been shown
In part the hidden, purposefully led
To hasten brotherhood into its own.
Mind God-endowed, by the Creator fed,
That he might date an era which God sieves
Anomoly of gentleness high-bred.
In lands where lust breeds war-a thought that lives
In every S 0 S that mankind gives.

MATTIE HALLAM LACY.

From Socrates' Talk to His Friends Before Drinking the Hemlock.

Friends, who would have acquitted me, I would like to talk with you about this thing which has happened, before I go to the place at which I must die. Stay then awhile, for we may as well talk with one another while there is time. You are my friends, and I should like to show you the meaning of this event which has happened to me. O my judges ¬for so I may truly call you, I should like to tell you of a wonderful circumstance.

Hitherto the familiar oracle within me has constantly been in the habit of opposing me, even in trifles, if I was going to make a slip or err in any matter; and now, as you see, there has come upon me the last and worst evil. But the oracle made no sign of opposition, either as I was leaving my house and going out in the morning, or while I was speaking, at anything which I was going to say; and yet I have often been stopped in the middle of a speech; but now in nothing that I either said or did touching this matter has the oracle opposed me. What do I take to be the explanation of this! I will tell you. I regard this as a great proof that what has happened to me is a good; and that those who think that death is an evil are in error. For the customary sign would surely have opposed me had I been going to evil and not to good. Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good. For one of two things- either death is a state of nothingness; or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.

Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare this with the other days and nights of his life; and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think this man- I will not say a private man, but even the great king- will not find many such days or nights, when compared with others. Now if death is like this I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night.

But if death is the journey to another place-'-and there, as men say, all the dead are-what good can be greater than this? If, indeed, when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there.

Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge, as in this world, so also in that. And I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise and is not. What would not a man give to be able to examine the leader of the Trojan expedition; or Odysseus, or Sisyphus, or numberless others-men and women, too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking questions in another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions; assuredly not. For besides being happier in that world than in this, they will be immortal, if what is said be true. Wherefore, be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty that no evil can happen to a good man, either in this life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods, nor has my own approaching, end happened by mere chance. But I see clearly that to die and be released was better for me; and therefore the oracle gave no sign.

For which reason, also, I am not angry with my condemners or with my accusers. They have done me no harm, although they did not mean to do me any good; and for this I may gently blame them. Still I have a favor to ask of them. When my sons grow up, I would ask you, my friends, to punish them. And I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches or anything more than about virtue. Or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing, then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are really something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, I and my sons will have received justice at your hands.

The hour of my departure has arrived, and we go our ways-I to die, and you to live. Which is better, God only knows.

-From Socrates' Talk to His Friends Before Drinking the Hemlock.

AN EPITAPH
The Body of Benjamin Franklin,
Printer
(Like the cover of an old book,
Its contents torn out
And stripped of its lettering and gilding)
Lies here food for worms.
Yet the work itself shall not be lost,
For it will (as he believes) appear once more
In a new
 And more beautiful Edition

Corrected and Amended
By
The Author

The Teak Forest

Whether I loved you who shall say?

Whether I drifted down your way
In the endless River of Chance and Change,
And you woke the strange
Unknown longings that have no names,
But burn us all in their hidden flames,
Who shall say?

Lite is a strange 'and a wayward thing:
We heard the bells of the Temples ring,
The married children, in passing, sing.
The month of marriage, the month of spring,
Was full of the breath of sunburnt flowers
That bloom in a fiercer light than ours,
And, under a sky more fiercely blue,
I came to you!

You told me tales of your vivid life
Where death was cruel and danger rife
Of deep dark forests, of poisoned trees,
Of pains and passions that scorch and freeze,
Of southern noontides and eastern nights,
Where love grew frantic with strange delights,
While men were slaying and maidens danced,
Till I, who listened, lay still, entranced.
Then, swift as a swallow heading south,
I kissed your mouth!

One night when the plains were bathed in blood
From sunset light in a crimson flood,
We wandered under the young teak trees
Whose branches whined in the light night breeze;
You led me down to the water's brink,
The Spring where the Panthers come to drink
At night; there is always water here
Be the season never so parched and sere.

Have we souls of beasts in the forms of men?
I fain would have tasted your life-blood then.
The night fell swiftly; this sudden land
Can never lend us a twilight strand
'Twixt the daylight shore and the ocean night,
But takes-as it gives-at once, tpelight.

We laid us down on the steep hillside,
While far below us wild peacocks cried,
And we sometimes heard, in the sunburnt grass,
The stealthy steps of the Jungle pass.
We listened; knew not whether they went
On love or hunger the more intent.
And under your kisses I hardly knew
Whether I loved or hated you.

But your words were flame and your kisses fire,
And who shall resist a strong desire?
Not I, whose life is a broken boat.
On a sea of passions, adrift, afloat.
And, whether I came in love or hate,
That I came to you was written by Fate
In every hue of the blood-red sky,
In every tone of the peacocks' cry,

While every gust of the Jungle night
Was fanning the flame you had set alight,
For these things have power to stir the blood
And compel us all to their own chance mood,
And to love or not we are no more free
Than a ripple to rise and leave the sea.

We are ever and always slaves of these,
Of the suns that scorch and the winds that freeze,
Of the faint sweet scents of the sultry air,
Of the half heard howl from the far off lair.
These chance things master us ever.
Compel To the heights of Heaven, the depths of Hell.

Whether I love you ? You do not ask,
Nor waste yourself on the thankless task.
I give your kisses at least return,
What matter whether they freeze or burn.
I feel the strength of your fervent arms,
What matter whether it heals or harms.

You are wise; you take what the Gods have sent.
You ask no question, but rest content
So I am with you to take your kiss,
And perhaps I value you more for this.
For this is Wisdom; to love, to live,
To take what Fate, or the Gods, may give,
To ask no question, to make no prayer,
To kiss the lips and caress the hair,
Speed passion's ebb as you greet its flow,
To have,-to hold,-and,-in time,-let go!

And this is our Wisdom: we rest together
On the great lone hills in the storm-filled weather,
And watch the skies as they pale and burn,
The golden stars in their orbits turn,
While Love is with us, and Time and Peace,
And life has nothing to give but these.

But, whether you love me, who shall say,
Or whether you, drifting down my way
In the great sad River of Chance and Change,
With your looks so weary and words so strange,
Lit my soul from some hidden flame
To a passionate longing without a name,
Who shall say?

Not I, who am but a broken boat,
Content for a while to drift afloat
In the little noontide of love's delights
Between two Nights.

LAURENCE HOPE.