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The coat without a seam, and other poems cover

The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 10: THE SWORD
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About This Book

This collection of lyric and narrative poems moves between wartime urgency and reflective peace, offering sonnets, elegies, and short lyrics that interrogate sacrifice, patriotism, and the yearning for reconciliation. Voices range from public banners and martial images to intimate meditations on grief, domestic memory, and nature. Frequent religious and moral imagery frames contemplations of duty, loss, and the possibility of a unified humanity. Formal variety includes sonnet sequences and freer lyrics, often balancing didactic rhetoric with tender observation to consider how communities and individuals reckon with conflict, remembrance, and the promise of healing.

MOODS OF WAR

THE SWORD

One of the seventy had a sword
The day that Christ was crucified:
He followed where they led his Lord,
The man that could not stand aside.
When that first hammer-stroke rang loud,
And left and right the rabble swayed,
He flashed from out the staring crowd,
He died upon the Roman blade.
His fruitless deed, his noteless name,
By careless Rome were never told.
Now shall we give him praise or blame?
Account him base, acclaim him bold?
Was he the traitor to his Lord,
Deeper than Peter that denied,
The loving soul that took the sword,
The man that would not stand aside?
Or did the glorious company
Of Michael’s sworded seraphim
With chivalrous high courtesy
Rise up to make a place for him?