The touch and the tornado; all our guns give tongue together, St. Barbara for the gunnery and God defend the right-- They are stopped and gapped and battered as we blast away the weather, Building window upon window to our lady of the light; For the light is come on Liberty, her foes are falling, falling, They are reeling, they are running, as the shameful years have run, She is risen for all the humble, she has heard the conquered calling, St. Barbara of the Gunners, with her hand upon the gun.
They are burst asunder in the midst that eat of their own flatteries, Whose lip is curled to order as its barbered hair is curled ... --Blast of the beauty of sudden death, St. Barbara of the batteries! That blew the new white window in the wall of all the world.
For the hand is raised behind us, and the bolt smites hard Through the rending of the doorways, through the death-gap of the Guard, For the shout of the Three Colours is in Condé and beyond, And the Guard is flung for carrion in the graveyard of St. Gond; Through Mondemont and out of it, through Morin marsh and on, With earthquake of salutation the impossible thing is gone; Gaul, charioted and charging, great Gaul upon a gun, Tiptoe on all her thousand years, and trumpeting to the sun, As day returns, as death returns, swung backward for a span, Back on the barbarous reign returns the battering-ram of Man.
While that the east held hard and hot like pincers in a forge, Came like the west wind roaring up the cannon of St. George, Where the hunt is up and racing over stream and swamp and tarn, And their batteries, black with battle, hold the bridge-heads of the Marne; And across the carnage of the Guard by Paris in the plain The Normans to the Bretons cried; and the Bretons cheered again; But he that told the tale went home to his house beside the sea And burned before St. Barbara, the light of the windows three. Three candles for an unknown thing, never to come again, That opened like the eye of God on Paris in the plain.
What are these tears of loneliness to-night? Hark! In my neighbour's house the music swells, Joins with the wind and fills the empty skies And dies away, like echo of old age Sighing and dying in the heart that fails. Ah! the cruel beauty ... how it creeps Into my home, into my waiting heart! Who am I that I wait to-night?... Alas, Where is the old content of maidenhood, The calmness and the laughter and the song, The patient hands unshaken as the needle Plied to the gentle rhythm that my lips Murmured, untroubled girlhood at their brink?