Out of a bronze sarcophagus,

Loose from the stone and copper

Steps a whitesmoke ghost

Lifting an authoritative hand

In the name of dreams worth dying for,

In the name of men whose dust breathes

of those dreams so worth dying for,

what they did being past words,

beyond all smooth and easy telling.

Be sad, be kind, be cool,

remembering, under God, a dreamdust

hallowed in the ruts and gullies,

solemn bones under the smooth blue sea,

faces warblown in a falling rain.

Sing low, sing high, sing wide.

Make your wit a guard and cover.

Let your laughter come free

like a help and a brace of comfort.

The earth laughs, the sun laughs

over every wise harvest of man,

over man looking toward peace

by the light of the hard old teaching:

“We must disenthrall ourselves.”

Read as the Phi Beta Kappa poem at the Mother Chapter of William and Mary College, Williamsburg, Virginia, December 1944. Published in the Saturday Evening Post, February, 1945

Abraham Lincoln’s Father and Mother*

Who was Abraham Lincoln’s father?

Who was Abraham Lincoln’s mother?

These are questions.

And a question seems to be a way of saying, “I don’t know—can you tell me?”

Or a question is a way of saying, “I know a little or I know much about something—can you tell me more about it?”

Or it is a way of saying, “I know enough and a plenty to satisfy me—yet there is the tragic or comic in the scrolls people unroll in answers.”

Or a question says, “Must we not have something to talk about? Were not tongues given us to be slipping words from? Is not the asking and answering of questions a way of passing the time while half alive for those who find that silence hurts and songs will not come?”

So . . . there are two questions . . . who was the man whose loins fathered Abe Lincoln? . . . who was the woman whose tissues held him and gave him into the world of dark red life he lived?

These are questions.

If the sheets of the seed planting that grew him, were under a lawful and ordered roof—

Or, if the earliest spring night of his life was in a drifting rain drizzle under a black oak tree or a white ash—

If he came under the speech of solemn and understood oaths where there was a door, a fire and a chimney—

Or if he came with only hills and stars for witnesses, with leaves and night wind whispering—

By either way or time there may be questions, there may be answers.

Who was Abe Lincoln’s father? . . . Mother?

I don’t know—can you tell me?

I know a little—can you tell me more?

I know enough to satisfy me.

1914

Lincoln*

Beat against the wall, O shadows.

Gateways are called for.

Open the valley doors.

It is night and loons sit chattering.

It is night and hyenas rip the guts of babies.