Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson

Orange gleams athwart a crimson soul Lambent flames; purple passion lurks In your dusk eyes. Red mouth; flower soft, Your soul leaps up—and flashes Star-like, white, flame-hot. Curving arms, encircling a world of love, You! Stirring the depths of passionate desire!

God washes clean the souls and hearts of you, His favored ones, whose backs bend o’er the soil, Which grudging gives to them requite for toil In sober graces and in vision true. God places in your hands the pow’r to do A service sweet. Your gift supreme to foil The bare-fanged wolves of hunger in the moil Of Life’s activities. Yet all too few Your glorious band, clean sprung from Nature’s heart; The hope of hungry thousands, in whose breast Dwells fear that you should fail. God placed no dart Of war within your hands, but pow’r to start Tears, praise, love, joy, enwoven in a crest To crown you glorious, brave ones of the soil.

Oft have I thrilled at deeds of high emprise, And yearned to venture into realms unknown, Thrice blessed she, I deemed, whom God had shown How to achieve great deeds in woman’s guise. Yet what discov’ry by expectant eyes Of foreign shores, could vision half the throne Full gained by her, whose power fully grown Exceeds the conquerors of th’ uncharted skies? So would I be this woman whom the world Avows its benefactor; nobler far, Than Sybil, Joan, Sappho, or Egypt’s queen. In the alembic forged her shafts and hurled At pain, diseases, waging a humane war; Greater than this achievement, none, I ween.

I had not thought of violets late, The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet In wistful April days, when lovers mate And wander through the fields in raptures sweet. The thought of violets meant florists' shops, And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine; And garish lights, and mincing little fops And cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines. So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed, I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams; The perfect loveliness that God has made,— Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams. And now—unwittingly, you've made me dream Of violets, and my soul's forgotten gleam.

O white little lights at Carney’s Point, You shine so clear o’er the Delaware; When the moon rides high in the silver sky, Then you gleam, white gems on the Delaware. Diamond circlet on a full white throat, You laugh your rays on a questioning boat; Is it peace you dream in your flashing gleam, O’er the quiet flow of the Delaware? And the lights grew dim at the water’s brim, For the smoke of the mills shredded slow between; And the smoke was red, as is new bloodshed, And the lights went lurid ’neath the livid screen. O red little lights at Carney’s Point, You glower so grim o’er the Delaware; When the moon hides low sombrous clouds below, Then you glow like coals o’er the Delaware. Blood red rubies on a throat of fire, You flash through the dusk of a funeral pyre; And there hearth fires red whom you fear and dread O’er the turgid flow of the Delaware? And the lights gleamed gold o’er the river cold, For the murk of the furnace shed a copper veil; And the veil was grim at the great cloud’s brim, And the lights went molten, now hot, now pale. O gold little lights at Carney’s Point, You gleam so proud o’er the Delaware; When the moon grows wan in the eastering dawn, Then you sparkle gold points o’er the Delaware. Aureate filagree on a Croesus’ brow, You hasten the dawn on a gray ship’s prow. Light you streams of gold in the grim ship’s hold O’er the sullen flow of the Delaware? And the lights went gray in the ash of day, For a quiet Aurora brought a halcyon balm; And the sun laughed high in the infinite sky, And the lights were forgot in the sweet, sane calm.

If I had known Two years ago how drear this life should be, And crowd upon itself allstrangely sad, Mayhap another song would burst from out my lips, Overflowing with the happiness of future hopes; Mayhap another throb than that of joy. Have stirred my soul into its inmost depths, If I had known. If I had known, Two years ago the impotence of love, The vainness of a kiss, how barren a caress, Mayhap my soul to higher things have soarn, Nor clung to earthly loves and tender dreams, But ever up aloft into the blue empyrean, And there to master all the world of mind, If I had known.

An idle lingerer on the wayside's road, He gathers up his work and yawns away; A little longer, ere the tiresome load Shall be reduced to ashes or to clay. No matter if the world has marched along, And scorned his slowness as it quickly passed; No matter, if amid the busy throng, He greets some face, infantile at the last. His mission? Well, there is but one, And if it is a mission he knows it, nay, To be a happy idler, to lounge and sun, And dreaming, pass his long-drawn days away. So dreams he on, his happy life to pass Content, without ambitions painful sighs, Until the sands run down into the glass; He smiles—content—unmoved and dies. And yet, with all the pity that you feel For this poor mothling of that flame, the world; Are you the better for your desperate deal, When you, like him, into infinitude are hurled?

I sit and sew—a useless task it seems, My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams— The panoply of war, the martial tred of men, Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death, Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath— But—I must sit and sew. I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire— That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things Once men. My soul in pity flings Appealing cries, yearning only to go There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe— But—I must sit and sew. The little useless seam, the idle patch; Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch, When there they lie in sodden mud and rain, Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain? You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream That beckons me—this pretty futile seam, It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?