The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 27: THE ULTIMATE VICTORY

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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.

THE ULTIMATE VICTORY

As men that labor in a mountain war—

Scaling sheer cliffs, hewing out stairs of stone,

Trenching the ice, quenching the torrent’s roar

With rolling thunders in the gorges lone—

Having seized a height, might stand with dazzled stare,

Seeing, beyond, a highest heavenly peak

Hung lucent as a cloud in the bright air,

Still to be won: O thus, even thus, we seek

Peace beyond War! and thus the Vision gleams

Upon us battling, that snow-crest sublime,

That holy mountain, that pure crown of dreams,

Toward which Man’s soul has struggled up through Time.

In blood and sweat we war that War may cease;

And storming the last peak, we conquer Peace.