Home Reginald Wright Kauffman
From Mr. Kauffman’s book of poems, “Little Old Belgium.” Henry Altemus Company, Publishers, Philadelphia. Copyright, 1914. Reproduced in this book by special permission.
At a pillaged hamlet near Termonde, I asked a dying peasant woman into which of the houses still standing I should assist her—which was her home? She pressed a withered hand to her bayonet-pierced side and answered: “The Germans have taken one home from me; but, without knowing it, they have given me another. I am going there now.”
MY house that I so soon shall own
Is builded in a silent place,
Not uncompanioned or alone,
But shared by almost all my race;
No landscape from its windows rolls
A picture of the earth’s increase;
But, oh, for all our stricken souls,
Within its sturdy walls is—Peace.
The other house I used to love
Before they burnt it overhead;
My slaughtered man; the memory of
Our daughter screaming in the red
Embrace of Uhlans at my door,
Her shrieks all silenced by their shout
Of drunken fury—that was war,
And my new home will shut it out.
I shall not see the German hands
That tear the baby from the breast;
I shall not hear the plundering bands
Laughing at murder: I shall rest.
There Joy shall never riot in
Nor robber sorrow find his way;
Those shutters bar the call of Sin,
And Duty has no debt to pay.
So much I shall be heedless of,
Serene, secure, dispassionate;
There is not anything to love;
There is not anything to hate.
So in my house I shall forget
All of the orgies and the strife,
And find, past memory and regret,
The Resurrection and the Life.