Seward daily gateway., 1925-07-10
EVOLUTION.

When you were tadpole and I was fish In the Paleozoic time;
 And side by side the ebbing tide We crawed through the ooze and slime Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen My heart was rife with the joys of life, For l loved you, even then. Mindless we lived and mindless we loved And mindless at last we died, And deep in the rifts of the Carados drifts We slumbered on side by side; The aeons and fled And the hot lands heaved amain, Till we caught our breath from the womb
 of death
 And crept into life again. We were amphibians scaled and tailed, And drab as a dead mans hand; We coiled at ease meath the dripping trees, Or crawled through the mud and sand; Croaking and blind with three-clawed feet Writing a language dumb, With never a spark in the empty dark To hint at a life to come. Then light and swift through the jungle trees We flung our airy flights, Or breathed in the balm of the smoulderng
 palm
 In the hush of the moonlit nights And Oh! what wonderful years were these, When our hearts chung each to each, And the shadows broke and our souls awoke In the first faint dawn of speech. Thus life by life and love by love- We passed through the cycles strange, And breath by breath, and death by death, We followed the change change, Till there came time in the law of life, When over the nursing sod, The shadows broke, and our souls awoke In a vague, dim dream of God l was thewed like the Auroch bull, And tusked like the great cave bear; And you, my sweet, from head to feet, Was gowned in your glorious hair; And in the gloom of fireess cave, While the night hung over the plain, And the moon hung red OCT the river bed, We munched the bones of the slain. l flaked flint to cutting edge, And shaped it with brutish craft; l broke shank from the woodland dank, And fitted it head and haft; Then l hid me close to the reedy tarn Where the mammoth came to drink, Through brawn and bone, I drove that stone And slew him upon the brink. Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes, Loud answered our kith and kin; From west and east to the crimson feast, The clans came trooping in; Through joint and gristle and padded hoof We fought and clawed and tore And cheek by jowl with many a howl, We talked the marvel oer ] carved that fight on a reindeer bone, With rude and hairy hand; l pictured his fall the cavern wall That men might understand: For we lived by blood and the might of right. Ere human laws were drawn, And the age of sin did not begin Till our brutal tusks were gone And that was million years ago, In time which no man knows; Yet here tonight in the mellow light, We sit at Delmonico's.
 Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs: Your hair IS as dark jet; Your time IS new, your lives are few Your soul untried and yet Our trail lies on the Kimmeridge clay. And the scarp of the Purbec flags; We have left our bones on the Bagshot stones And Tn the heart of the Coraling crags; Our love is cold, our lives are old And death shall come again; snail 1t come today. what man shall say That we shall not live again
 beds
 And furnished us wings to fly: He sowed our spawn in the worlds dim down. Ano Know that we shall not die; 1nougn cltles have grown above the graves Where the crook-boned men made war And the oxswain creaks OCT the buried caves where the mummied mammoths are 50 as we finger at luncheon here, Der many dainty dish Let us drink anew to the time when yo,1 were tadpole and l was fish.