<html xmlns:tei="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0"><body><h1 align="center" class="head">Christmas: 1915</h1><div class="stanza"><p class="line"><span class="smallcaps">Now</span> is the midnight of the nations: dark</p><p class="line" style="text-indent:5%">Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas,</p><p class="line" style="text-indent:5%">Earth, like a mother in birth agonies,</p><p class="line">Screams in her travail, and the planets hark</p><p class="line">Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark,</p><p class="line" style="text-indent:5%">Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees</p><p class="line" style="text-indent:5%">Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades,</p><p class="line">Wrenching the night's imponderable arc.</p></div><div class="stanza"><p class="line">Christ! What shall be delivered to the morn</p><p class="line" style="text-indent:5%">Out of these pangs, if ever indeed another</p><p class="line" style="text-indent:5%">Morn shall succeed this night, or this vast mother</p><p class="line">Survive to know the blood-spent offspring, torn</p><p class="line" style="text-indent:5%">From her racked flesh? -- What splendour from the smother?</p><p class="line">What new-wing'd world, or mangled god stillborn?</p></div><p class="byline">Percy MacKaye</p></body></html> · Great War