GROTESQUE

With the first light on the skyline came the rapping of the sickles And the brown arms of the reapers bent to toil another morn; Close beside me in the glimmer, in the golden sweep and shimmer, Knelt a reaper strange among us, crooning thro’ the ragged corn: “Born of sorrow, Gone to-morrow— Gone to lie in yonder valley where their fathers long have lain; Men who know not ship nor sabre, Each but drudges by his neighbor, And the fields wherein they labor are a heritage of pain!” Sleep was heavy on our eyelids when a lone star followed sunset, But we missed the pale young stranger, none knew whither he had gone— Then, from where the dead are lying, with the nightwind’s tender sighing Rose and fell a last low cadence of the voice we heard at dawn: “Weary reapers, Early sleepers— Brief the glow that drifts across them from the waning August moon: These that rest beyond its gleaming Lie unvexed of drift or dreaming, And the fields with harvest teeming have forgot them all too soon!”