Run from this ugliness we call our lives,
Black mirror of hunger and hate
And turn your faces against the night.

( skirt the Death wood's edge
and soldiers weeping for lives they have taken--
the winds will follow sobbing each whispered name, ----
flee thru city streets back to cold hearths
and stampede the bleached dead who waited
in this funeral place for food--
their sorry ghosts will creep into your minds and nest ----
draw a curtain of shame across our windows
that we may not see the world we have made--
plant a child's fingers in this wild garden--
catch our coward's tears in a deep yellow bowl
to water them--
they will grow and mark the wide fields we have left
untilled ---- )

How painful it is that we who slept
Blind when the locusts came,
Deaf when the alarm sounded,
Should wake in this accusing lateness
To see and hear.

Robert A. Davis

( Second draft, January 3, 1940 )