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GEORGE CRAIN

First Bitterness

University of North Dakota

Tell me, why did Death take my flower
When doctors skilled, connived

To save his life,

While the nine half-breed children

In the hut below the mill

Ran barefoot thru the snow

Regardless of the fearful plague

And thrived?

Was he too beautiful for earth,
Our infant son?

You envied us his smile so sweet,

And took our longed-for son,
You fiend!

You hated us because he was so fair,

And would not let him eat,

While old drunken Potter

Thrown half across the street

By a fast-going taxicab,

Revived!

He was the summit of our love

The flower of our two years wedded joy.

A brief two years of happiness,

And now the pain,

Oh God, our baby boy!

While down Fish alley

Molly Belatt,

Cursed her healthy, unwelcome bastard brat.

Death took our first-born son;

Love could not hold him.

The hours we spent in visioning his life
With us from babyhood to manhood

Mock and jibe;

And every moment of our love and care for him Shrieks out of corners where we run to hide

Our bitterness.

"They must have needed angels"

His mother said.

(There is no heaven)

You took him,

Dead!

Yet widow Paulson lay for years

Groaning with pain upon her invalid's bed.

The Coffin In the Express-House

B. A. BOTKIN

Columbia University

Deaf to the rumble of trucks on the floor,
Endlessly winding from door to door,

Blind to the bending and straining men
That reap confusion and sow it again,

Strangely remote, in a corner it lies,
Still with a quiet that shuts out their cries.

What is the aching and heart-breaking day To "Remains of in transit," a box on its way,

Awaiting mid ribald laughter and oath.
The decorous hearse oblivious of both?

For me in the heat and the dust it is good
To gaze at the coolly impersonal wood,

And check a pilfering craving to reach
Into a crate for a blooming peach.

With a look that is sad and imperious and wise, It chastens and chides my mouth and eyes,

Purging me, lifting above the roar

To the souls in transit from shore to shore.

Finis

PAUL DE WITT PAGE

Georgetown College

I dreamt I knelt beside the couch, oh sweet,
Where you lay dying; that your fairy feet
Were stilled at last

From dancing and your face was bleak and gray

As if for sorrow of some bitter day

In the dead past.

The glory of your swift and sun-kissed hair

Lay framed about your face, where brooding

care

Had graven deep

And tear-washed lines. Your pale face wore a

frown

And quivering your eyelids fluttered down
As if to sleep.

You knew me at the end. Through parted lips
You murmured softly, "Not my finger-tips."
And from the bed

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