Swift go my days

To-morrow

SWIFT, Swift go my days.

By rights I think time should drag with me, for I am wasting my portion of life as I live it.

But my days pass Swift—Swift, Swift.

They come, they fly away—before I know.

I’m thinking it is Tuesday: but while I’m thinking—Wednesday has come: and gone: and Thursday is rushing in. Tuesday, blue-and-gold or gray-and-silver, with its mornings and nights and bits of food and openings of doors and thinkings: Wednesday with the same equipment: Thursday the same.

Each day comes and goes like a flash of filmed silvered garbled light.

But there is time in each for me to touch the enchanted Everydayness: time for the turbulent sly delight of tasting, smelling, feeling the eternal humors and romances in each small thing near me—my Clock, my Window, my Jar of Cold Cream, my Two Thumbs. There is time in each day for it to make me pay a wearing glimmering feverish homage to the mystic daily godhead.

My life exacts terrific homages from me.

I am wearing out—frailly, tiredly, from a desolate uneasy love of living.

It is why my days go Swift when by rights time should drag leadenly in punishment for barbarous futileness.

There is not time-space enough in any of the days sufficient to love the virile green and the murderous red and the sweet pale surprising purple in the sunset above the west desert: nor space to love the smell of a sudden August rain: nor the flaming delicate Idea of the poet John Keats.

While I’m starting to love each of those to its height of love-worthiness—the to-day is gone: and the to-morrow, which must see a new love-game started for each Thing, is come.

But while I say ‘is come’: it’s gone.

So Swift go my days—oh Swift, Swift!

By the blood of dead Americans

To-morrow

SINCE I wrote the beginning of this there has come the war in Europe: a war full of suffering brave women and dead children: full of German greed and cruelty and stupidity and of French gameness and cheerfulness, French splendor of valor.

It has an effect of some kind on each person who reads so much as its ‘headlines.’

It has the effect on me of making me a jealously patriotic American.

It makes me think of Lexington and Gettysburg with an odd furious personal shame.

We are Americans not by accident but by the blood of dead Americans. But we assume it is by accident.

We lie down like a nation of bastards to let the pig-hearted Hun trample by proxy on our neck.

It was for America to declare war in the same hour the Lusitania passengers met murder.

We were not ‘too proud’ but afraid. Afraid and not ready.

Not ready has no right thing to do with it.

They were not ready at Lexington.

I long with some passion to exchange my two black dresses for two white ones with red crosses on the sleeves: to serve my country in a day of death and honor.

It too is all the time under my skin though I write along but in this flawed song of myself.