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The coat without a seam, and other poems cover

The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 45: THE GLEAM TRAVELS
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 GLEAM TRAVELS

It is morning, and April.
(They sleep, but I am alive and awake— the soft warm lucent blue of the spring heaven bathes my soul.)
There, and again there, the willow-veils hanging, golden-green, tremulous,
Near by, the bright red-bronze of the lifted cherry-boughs, flashing in the sun,
Far off, gray-purple of the woods warming to life;
The clouds floating—O so full of light and blessing, that I think they live and love,
Or truly that they are beautiful veils, not all hiding that which lives and loves!
Morning, and April,
And on the far-away road, hither leading, the road but now gray with the cloud-shadow,
The gleam travels.
Hitherward the gleam travels;
Behind it lies the gray shadow on the hill.
O life immense! O love unspeakable! O large To-day!
O moment of utterance given to me (the shadow too travels),
O moment of joy, of trust, of song for my soul, and for those who sleep, and for those who shall by and by wake!
Life,
Morning, and April—
Hitherward the gleam travels!