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From “Volunteers” Charles Hastings, Delaware
MY home is in Laurel. | |
| But they speak my name there no more. | |
| Yet the place is still green in my memory, | |
| And I’m only twenty five—I may be forgiven. | |
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| But tell this to my people there for me, | 5 |
| And put it in their paper: | |
| That I’ve wandered many miles from home | |
| Since the dark night when I ran away; | |
| And now I’ve enlisted for the war. | |
| My path is too winding and hidden | 10 |
| For them ever to find clues of me, | |
| But I’d like my people to know that I understand now | |
| How a weary life and destroyed ways | |
| Take many a man away from home. | |
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| I know too the selfishness of the stony cities now; | 15 |
| For in them my Buddy and I | |
| Once threw dice for the only job to be had. | |
| And I took to the road and its taunts, | |
| And he took the job. | |
| But both of us had known together | 20 |
| The cold glitter of the stars over us all night, | |
| When the heart-sides of us thumped hard | |
| And were sad. | |
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| But I want my people to know nothing of that. | |
| Tell them only that after seven years’ wandering | 25 |
| My heart is growing peaceful again | |
| And my face bright with looking toward my home; | |
| And that the army is my refuge, | |
| Where I’m happy and content. | |
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| Tell them too that on my first furlough | 30 |
| I’ll be returning to them in the old house. | |
| Returning! returning!— | |
| There’s in that word something beautiful | |
| To me now! | |
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| But my young laughter is returning in silence, | 35 |
| And my fierce waywardness is returning in sorrow— | |
| Tenderly to the mother who thought | |
| She would see her son no more. | |
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