VERSES

Evening Star, Issue 22460, 3 October 1936, Page 23

VERSES

RETIRED The quick-receding illness left him curiously alive. “ No wonder, though,” he chuckled, “ 1 am only sixty-live! ” He paused a jaunty moment with his hands upon his hips, Tlhen strode into his office with a song between his lips. A brisk young man was at his desk, importantly at work. Dictating to a youthful, blonde, and stenographic clerk. He took one understanding glance and crept away to die: For men succumb to heart-break when their world has passed them by. Men set their steps to duty as -they ■ march to drum and fife; •Jue singing rhyme of labour is the very .pulse of life, music stops; The frightened blood no longer keeps the neat; And crooked paths are stumbled on by unremembering feet. Our tasks may glpw like jewels or excoriate like gins, But, once their motive is withdrawn, the deadly ebb begins: We call it “ hardened arteries,” “ pneumonia,” and “ flu,” But men will die of heart-break when they’ve nothing left to do. The useful art of patricide, to an impartial mind. As. practised in these later days, seems gentler, more refined Than-when they led their aged out, defenceless (there’s the rub) To line them up against a wall and kill them with a club. The method of the modern world is more humane and neat— Wo do not push them off the cliff or fatten them to eat —_ But-weary sands arc running out, the f twilight closing grey, The doom of death upon them, when we take their jobs away. —Homer C. House, New York.

THE Elfi TREE -V-;-.-. - There were boats in the harbour And goats on the hill, And fields and fields of asphodel, And a lemon grove near the mill; Petals dropped from the almond trees. The young corn rippled before the ' breeze, But the fig , tree stood naked and silver. The loveliest thing in the land. —Rose Marie Hodgson, in the ‘ Observer.’