Widows
The world was widowed by the death of Christ:
Vainly its suffering soul for peace has sought
And found it not.
For nothing, nothing, nothing has sufficed
To bring back comfort to the stricken house
From whence has gone the Master and the Spouse.
In its long widowhood the world has striven
To find diversion. It has turned away
From the vast awefull silences of Heaven
(Which answer but with silence when we pray)
And sought for something to assuage its grief.
Some surcease and relief
From sorrow, in pursuit of mortal joys.
It drowned God's stillness in a sea of noise;
It lost God's presence in a blur of forms;
Till, bruised and bleeding with life's brutal storms,
Unto immutable and speechless space
The World lifts up its face,
Its haggard, tear-drenched face,
And cries aloud for faith's supreme reward,
The promised Second Coming of its Lord.
So many widows, widows everywhere,
The whole earth teems with widows.
Guns that blare-
Winged monsters of the air-
And deep-sea monsters leaping through the water,
Hell bent on slaughter,
All these plough paths for widows. Maids at dawn,
And brides at noon, ere eventide pass on
Into the ranks of widows: but to weep
Just for a little space; then will grief sleep
In their young bosoms, where sweet hope belongs,
New love will sing once more its age-old songs,
And life bloom as a rose-tree blooms again
After a night of rain.
There are complacent widows clothed in crêpe
Who simulate a grief that is not real.
Through paths of seeming sorrow they escape
From disappointed hopes to some ideal,
Or, from the penury of unloved wives
Walk forth to opulent lives.
And there are widows who shed all their tears
Just at the first
In one wild burst,
And then go lilting lightly down the years:
Black butterflies, they flit from flower to flower
And live in the thin pleasures of the hour;
Merging their tender memories of the dead
In tenderer dreams of being once more wed.
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poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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