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The coat without a seam, and other poems cover

The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 21: THE WAY OF THE WHITE SOULS
By Helen Gray Cone
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Poetry

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.

THE WAY OF THE WHITE SOULS

(To the Memory of Joyce Kilmer, killed in action, July 30, 1918)

I stood in the summer night, when the hosts of heaven seemed nigh,
And I saw the powdery swirl of stars, where it swept across the sky,
The wide way of the white stars, where it ran up and down,
And my heart was sad for the man who said It was Main Street, Heaventown.
He chose to walk in the Main Street, in the wide ways of men;
He set wings to the common things with the kind touch of his pen;
He caught the lilt of the old tune that the hearts of the plain folk beat;
He might have dreamed on the far faint hills—but he walked in the Main Street.
He knelt down with his fellows, in the warm faith of the throng;
He went forth with his fellows to fight a monstrous Wrong;
He marched away to the true tune that the hearts of brave men beat,
Shoulder to brown shoulder, with the men in the Main Street.
A road runs bright through the night of Time, since ever the world began,
The wide Way of the White Souls, the Main Street of Man,
The sky-road of the star-souls, beyond all wars and scars;
And there the singing soul of him goes on with the marching stars.
So, as I stand in the summer night, when the hosts of heaven seem nigh,
And look at the powdery swirl of stars, where it sweeps across the sky,
The wide way of the white stars, where it runs up and down,
My heart shall be glad for the friend who said It was Main Street, Heaventown.