Now, Christ be
thanked!
Contemporary Verse - v01-02
Last night the moon lay white on all the land, A boat was anchored
Here beside the stream.
Oh, 'twas a merry party
Setting forth,
And you were here, And those we loved, And I.
One took the oars
And rowed us toward the hills.
The woods closed in,
The stream grew dark,
And then
The boat was grounded sudden on the shoals,
And I
Said quickly that perhaps
We'd come too far.
Too far, they all agreed,
And turned us back.
Then quietly you rose and stepped ashore, And with a smile to me,
Said,
"I am going on
To find the source,"
And left us there,
And I —
Dear comrade, do they call you dead ? Ah no, not I!
9
YOUR EYES ARE LIKE THE SEA By Leslie Nelson Jennings
Your eyes are like the sea
When air and sky, by some old alchemy,
Draw from the fires of spring The very substance of infinity—
The color of the stars' own conjuring.
. . .
Lost on a desert's parched immensity,
Your eyes
I seemed to be
And thirst had clutched my throat
Like strangler's fingers, while unpityingly
The arrows of the sun upon me smote.
Green promise there was none,
Nor hill to cast a shade, nor upright stone.
And I was dying there
Like some poor stricken beast, unmissed, alone
In God-forgotten vasts of yellow glare.
And then I thought there grew
Still waters on my sight, unshored and blue.
Now, Christ be thanked! I cried,
And ran to plunge my cracking flesh into That blessed lake, to quaff it undenied.
I knelt there, and it seemed, — One moment, that my torture had been dreamed
I drank most thankfully . . .
The blood-red sun bent over me
Your eyes are like the sea—the bitter sea!
. . .
Iscreamed. . .
EASTWARD IN THE "COMMONWEALTH" By Esther Morton Smith
She churns her way down the foaming sound; Her feathering paddles dip and shove
And rise again on their endless round
From the nether plunge to the heights above.
Swiftly and quietly down she slips,
A lighthouse to starboard, and one to port,
The colored lanterns of passing ships, A tow of barges, an old gray fort;
And we aboard her are lulled to rest
By the rhythmic beat of her mighty heart,
By the song of the winds from the salt southwest And the wash of the waters her great prows part.
Hark! she is speaking; a fog has fallen, Drifting in from the outer sea.
