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From “War Times”
TWENTY-SIX thousand men are building at Bethlehem | |
| Armor plates and palisades and props of steel for the peace of Christ, | |
| That comes momently, by breathing spells, in a world forever at war: | |
| Twenty-six thousand men sweating blindly to build a world forever beginning to fall; | |
| Twenty-six thousand men are making tools for breaking, scrapping, scraping and fixing foundations anew. | 5 |
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| For life ever fuses and glows, | |
| Like the heart of a rose in the fire that eats up red billets of steel like raw fagots of wood. | |
| And a war is as good as a rose in the eyes of the Watcher of Space; | |
| A war is as brief as a rose in its growth and its death in the fire of the Forger of Stars. | |
| And the fire ever burns out the dross in the depths of the stone and the soul. | 10 |
| All the fires that ape or man ever kindled on earth were lit and fused to keep these crucibles boiling. | |
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| And now they roll a loaded crucible that flames white-hot along the level rails and swinging truck-ways overhead. | |
| And the moulds are made ready and prepared. | |
| And they look like trenches of shadow, before the raw red tide of war pours into them. | |
| And one half-naked foreman of his gang is a general of today’s grim shaping of life. | 15 |
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| A general who knows his job and holds it hard-fisted, | |
| Holds it and sways it like a tool he beats and welds and batters with. | |
| For the war is a job and a tool, that must be beaten out and battled with to the bitter end of the stint; and finally finished. | |
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| Ten huge trip-hammers rising and falling in cadenced choruses affirm it. | |
| Twenty-six rolling-mills, that print a gospel new and red in steel still raw, are ready to publish it. | 20 |
| Twenty-six thousand men, twenty-six million men, in smoke and fumes and mud and grime, assert and by their blood and breath maintain it. | |
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