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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Florence Wilkinson

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Speech

Florence Wilkinson

WORDS, words, words,

Like starry flies on the sleeper’s brain.

Listen, all over the roads of earth

You can hear our steps like rain!

We are loud, ephemeral, vain,

Motes in the sunlight stirred;

Yet blazoned with ancestry,

For God himself is a Word.

Words, words, words,

Nought may put us to scorn!

Yea, the unanswering dead,

And the mouth of the newly born.