Christmas: 1915

by Percy McKaye

Now is the midnight of the nations: dark
Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas,
Earth, like a mother in birth agonies,
Screams in her travail, and the planets hark
Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark,
Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees
Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades,
Wrenching the night's imponderable arc.

Christ! What shall be delivered to the morn
     Out of these pangs, if ever indeed another
     Morn shall succeed this night, or this vast mother
Survive to know the blood-spent offspring, torn
     From her racked flesh? --What spendour from the
     smother?
What new-wing'd world, or mangled god still-born?

Christmas Poems
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