The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.1968, Side 25

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
23
Even the proud savage feared their stalk,
Like the creep of warriors from darker alien tribes;
Self-dissatisfied, he culled,
Then sowed the chosen seed,
Killing the wild invaders,
And taming what was best;
And from the peace and discipline of weeding,
Came meditation;
And a consciousness of destiny;
And with the honesty of crops in season,
Came self-assurance,
And a time for all things.
Soon with the sweetness of the wheat which gave him bread,
He found life more refined and more abundant.
Poetry burst from the splash-colored sunset
To trumpet its life cry in the womb-fresh mornings.
But always the weed-war,
Harassing through the epochs;
Always the voracious wild-oat spearing upward,
Tapping the life-juice for itself,
Stunting the true oat, its cultured kin;
And quack, with mile-long fibres,
Strangling the honest wheat
With attack subterranean—
Disorder, vying with order,
Unreason with reason,
And undiscipline with discipline,
In constant see-saw battle,
With never a sure and final victory.
Man knows this outward war,
For it is like his own,
Tormenting through the ages,
When inwardly he dares confront himself:
Face of savage, to face of angel-mould;
Seeing his cool logic,
Out-flooded by wild blood,
And his love-law challenged by fang-law.
His cave-lusts millennium deep,
Rear up again and yet again;
Ripping through the hymen-veil of convention,
In a phallic, or a dagger thrust;
Sometimes he hides them,