Langdon Smith

“I was thewed like an Auroch bull Were gowned in your glorious hair.”

“I flaked a flint to a cutting edge And fitted it, head and haft.”

“Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn, And slew him upon the brink.”

“Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes, The clan came tramping in.”

“I carved that fight on a reindeer bone Till our brutal tusks were gone.”

“And that was a million years ago Your soul untried, and yet —”

“Our love is old, our lives are old, We shall not live again?”

“God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds Where the mummied mammoths are.”

“For we know the clod, by the grace of God Will beckon from death to death.”

“Then as we linger at luncheon here Were a tadpole and I was a fish.”

“When you were a tadpole and I was a fish For I loved you even then.”

“Mindless we lived and mindless we loved And crept into light again.”

“Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feetTo hint at a life to come.”

“Yet happy we lived and happy we loved, And the night of death was past.”

“And, oh! what beautiful years were these In the first faint dawn of speech.”

“Thus life by life and love by love In a strange, dim dream of God.”