WHEN MY mind was released
from the black cavern of oblivion
and woke up into an intolerable surprise
it found itself at the crater of a volcanic hell-fire
that spouted forth a stifling fume of insult to Man;
it witnessed the long-drawn suicidal agony of the Time-spirit
passing through convulsions of a monstrous deformity worse than death.
On its one side a defiant savagery
and the growl of homicidal drunkenness,
on the other timid powers tied to the load
of their carefully guarded hoardings,
meekly settling down to a silent safety of acquiescence
after miscalculated bursts of impatience.
At the old nations' council-chambers
plans and protests are pressed flat between the tight-shut prudent lips.
In the meanwhile across the sky rush with their blazing blasphemy
the soulless swarms of vulture-machines
carrying their missiles of ravenous passion for human entrails.
Give me power, O awful Judge,
sitting on the throne of Eternity,
give me a voice of thunder,
that I may hurl imprecation
upon this cannibal whose gruesome hunger
spares neither women nor children,
that my words of reproach may ever rock
upon the heart-throbs of a history humiliated by itself,
till this age choked and chained
finds the bed of its final rest in its ashes.

LOVE, THOU hast made great my life with death's magnificence, and
hast tinted all my thoughts and dreams with radiant hues of thy farewell rays.
The tear-washed limpid light reveals at life's last sunset-point
the hints of Paradise, where descending flame of Kiss from
starry sphere of love lights the sorrows of our earth to
splendour of their end, in one blazing ecstasy of uttermost extinction.
Love, thou hast made one vast wonder Life and Death for me.

THE RAIN HAS held back for days and days, my God, in my arid heart. The horizon is fiercely naked-not the thinnest cover of a soft cloud, not the vaguest hint of a distant cool shower.
Send thy angry storm, dark with death, if it is thy wish, and with lashes of lightning startle the sky from end to end.
But call back, my lord, call back this pervading silent heat, still and keen and cruel, burning the heart with dire despair.
Let the cloud of grace bend low from above like the tearful look of the mother on the day of the father's wrath.