The Voice before the Void: Arcana, Story, Poetry

World War I:

Soldier’s war poetry.

“Who Made the Law?”

Leslie Coulson

Who made the Law that men should die in meadows?

Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?

Who gave it forth that gardens should be bone-yards?

Who spread the hills with flesh, and blood, and brains?

Who made the Law?

Who made the Law that Death should stalk the village?

Who spake the word to kill among the sheaves,

Who gave it forth that death should lurk in hedgerows,

Who flung the dead among the fallen leaves?

Who made the Law?

Those who return shall find that peace endures,

Find old things old, and know the things they knew,

Walk in the garden, slumber by the fireside,

Share the peace of dawn, and dream amid the dew —

Those who return.

Those who return shall till the ancient pastures,

Clean-hearted men shall guide the plough-horse reins,

Some shall grow apples and flowers in the valleys,

Some shall go courting in summer down the lanes —

THOSE WHO RETURN.

But who made the Law? the Trees shall whisper to him:

“See, see the blood — the splashes on our bark!”

Walking the meadows, he shall hear bones crackle,

And fleshless mouths shall gibber in silent lanes at dark.

Who made the Law?

Who made the Law? At noon upon the hillside

His ears shall hear a moan, his cheeks shall feel a breath,

And all along the valleys, past gardens, crofts, and homesteads,

HE who made the Law,

He who made the Law,

He who made the Law shall walk along with Death.

St. Valentine’s Day Special

“The Glory of the Day was in her Face”

James Weldon Johnson

The glory of the day was in her face,

The beauty of the night was in her eyes.

And over all her loveliness, the grace

Of Morning blushing in the early skies.

And in her voice, the calling of the dove;

Like music of a sweet, melodious part.

And in her smile, the breaking light of love;

And all the gentle virtues in her heart.

And now the glorious day, the beauteous night,

The birds that signal to their mates at dawn,

To my dull ears, to my tear-blinded sight

Are one with all the dead, since she is gone.

St. Valentine’s Day Special:

How to apologize for running late.

“One Morning”

Ambrose Bierce

Because that I am weak, my love, and ill,

I cannot follow the impatient feet

Of my desire, but sit and watch the beat

Of the unpitying pendulum fulfill

The hour appointed for the air to thrill

And brighten at your coming. O my sweet,

The tale of moments is at last complete—

The tryst is broken on the gusty hill!

O lady, faithful-footed, loyal-eyed,

The long leagues silence me; yet doubt me not;

Think rather that the clock and sun have lied

And all too early, you have sought the spot.

For lo! despair has darkened all the light,

And till I see your face it still is night.

St. Valentine’s Day Special:

Become this. Become this.

“The Lovers”

Rumi

from Hush, Don’t Say Anything to God: Passionate Poems of Rumi

translated from Persian by Shahram Shiva

The lovers

will drink wine night and day.

They will drink until they can

tear away the veils of intellect and

melt away the layers of shame and modesty.

When in Love,

body, mind, heart and soul don’t even exist.

Become this,

fall in Love, and you will not be separated again.

World War I

“Sweet and fitting it is

To die for one’s country.”

Poem emblematic of the First World War, and of all war.

-The Voice before the Void

“Dulce et Decorum Est”

Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! –  An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Vampire romance – vintage, and done properly… that is: with horror.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“The Canal”

Everil Worrell

Past the sleeping city the river sweeps; along its left bank the old canal creeps.

I did not intend that to be poetry, although the scene is poetic—somberly, gruesomely poetic, like the poems of Poe. I know it too well—I have walked too often over the grass-grown path beside the reflections of black trees and tumble-down shacks and distant factory chimneys in the sluggish waters that moved so slowly, and ceased to move at all.

I have always had a taste for nocturnal prowling. As a race we have grown too intelligent to take seriously any of the old, instinctive fears that preserved us through preceding generations. Our sole remaining salvation, then, has come to be our tendency to travel in herds. We wander at night—but our objective is somewhere on the brightly lighted streets, or still somewhere where men do not go alone. When we travel far afield, it is in company. Few of my acquaintance, few in the whole city here, would care to ramble at midnight over the grass-grown path I have spoken of—not because they would fear to do so, but because such things are not being done.

Well, it is dangerous to differ individually from one’s fellows. It is dangerous to wander from the beaten road. And the fears that guarded the race in the dawn of time and through the centuries were founded on reality.

A month ago, I was a stranger here. I had just taken my first position—I was graduated from college only three months before, in the spring. I was lonely, and likely to remain so for some time, for I have always been of a solitary nature, making friends slowly.

I had received one invitation out, to visit the camp of a fellow employee in the firm for which I worked, a camp which was located on the farther side of the wide river, the side across from the city and the canal, where the bank was high and steep and heavily wooded, and little tents blossomed all along the water’s edge. At night these camps were a string of sparkling lights and tiny, leaping campfires, and the tinkle of music carried faintly far across the calmly flowing water. That far bank of the river was no place for an eccentric, solitary man to love. But the near bank, which would have been an eyesore to the campers had not the river been so wide—the near bank attracted me from my first glimpse of it.

We embarked in a motor-boat at some distance downstream, and swept up along the near bank, and then out and across the current. I turned my eyes backward. The murk of stagnant water that was the canal, the jumble of low buildings beyond it, the lonely, low-lying waste of the narrow strip of land between canal and river, the dark, scattered trees growing there—I intended to see more of these things.

That week-end bored me, but I repaid myself no later than Monday evening, the first evening when I was back in the city, alone and free. I ate a solitary dinner immediately after leaving the office. I went to my room and slept from seven until nearly midnight. I wakened naturally, then, for my whole heart was set on exploring the alluring solitude I had discovered. I dressed, slipped out of the house and into the street, started the motor in my roadster and drove through the lighted streets.

When I parked my car on a rough, cobbled street that ran directly down into the inky waters of the canal, and crossed a narrow bridge, I was repaid. In a few minutes I set my feet on the old tow-path where mules had drawn river-boats up and down only a year or so ago. As I walked upstream at a swinging pace, the miserable shacks where miserable people lived across the canal seemed to march with me, and then fell behind.

The bridge I had crossed was near the end of the city going north, as the canal marked its western extremity. Ten minutes of walking,

World War I:

Soldier’s war poetry.

“Suicide in the Trenches”

Siegfried Sassoon

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

 

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

How a soul cries.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Who Are My People?”

Rosa Zagnoni Marinoni

My people? Who are they?

I went into the church where the congregation

Worshiped my God. Were they my people?

I felt no kinship to them as they knelt there.

My people! Where are they?

I went into the land where I was born,

Where men spoke my language…

I was a stranger there.

“My people,” my soul cried. “Who are my people?”

Last night in the rain I met an old man

Who spoke a language I do not speak,

Which marked him as one who does not know my God.

With apologetic smile he offered me

The shelter of his patched umbrella.

I met his eyes… And then I knew…

Old stories, told long ago.

⁓The Voice before the Void

“Three Toes of Harding County”

Wikipedia

Three Toes of Harding County was the nickname given to a solitary North American male wolf who killed livestock at ranches in Harding County, South Dakota over a thirteen-year period in the early 20th century. His hunting range extended into southwestern North Dakota and southeastern Montana.

Three Toes began his depredations in 1912, becoming a fully fledged livestock killer by 1917. He was estimated to have killed $50,000 worth of livestock in his thirteen-year career. He is known to have killed 66 sheep in two nights shortly before his capture. He was pursued by over 150 men, only to be trapped on July 23, 1925, in the Kahoun pasture, near Gallup, South Dakota, by Clyde F. Briggs, the state deputy predatory animal inspector.

Three Toes was thought to have been 20 years old, and measured 6 feet in length and weighed between 75 and 80 pounds.

World War I:

Soldier’s war poetry.

“Dead Man’s Dump”

Isaac Rosenberg

The plunging limbers over the shattered track

Racketed with their rusty freight,

Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,

And the rusty stakes like sceptres old

To stay the flood of brutish men

Upon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead

But pained them not, though their bones crunched;

Their shut mouths made no moan.

They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,

Man born of man, and born of woman;

And shells go crying over them

From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them,

All the time of their growth

Fretting for their decay:

Now she has them at last!

In the strength of their strength

Suspended–stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?

Earth! Have they gone into you?

Somewhere they must have gone,

And flung on your hard back

Is their souls’ sack,

Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.

Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits’ shadows shake the grass,

Or stood aside for the half-used life to pass

Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,

When the swift iron burning bee

Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,

Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,

Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,

Immortal seeming ever?

Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,

A fear may choke in our veins

And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,

The dark air spurts with fire,

The explosions ceaseless are.

Timelessly now, some minutes past,

These dead strode time with vigorous life,

Till the shrapnel called ‘An end!’

But not to all. In bleeding pangs

Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,

Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

A man’s brains splattered on

A stretcher-bearer’s face:

His shook shoulders slipped their load,

But when they bent to look again

The drowning soul was sunk too deep

For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,

Stretched at the cross roads.

Burnt black by strange decay

Their sinister faces lie,

The lid over each eye;

The grass and coloured clay

More motion have than they,

Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead.

His dark hearing caught our far wheels,

And the choked soul stretched weak hands

To reach the living world the far wheels said;

The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,

Crying through the suspense of the far-torturing wheels

Swift for the end to break

Or the wheels to break,

Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight,

‘Will they come? Will they ever come?’

Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,

The quivering-bellied mules,

And the rushing wheels all mixed

With his tortured upturned sight.

So we crashed round the bend,

We heard his weak scream,

We heard his very last sound,

And our wheels grazed his dead face.