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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Helen Louise Birch

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

Laughing in the Moonlight

Helen Louise Birch

THREE women laughing

In the moonlight,

In the night—

Eerie,

Strange,

With sound of water

Thundering up the cliff;

With sound that comes from swaying boughs

Of pine trees,

Giant pines of a virgin forest—

Fringe of wilderness,

The border

Of a narrow strip of clearing

On the bluffs.

Laughing! How their voices carry!

Fearlessly!

Such merriment

As must awake the sleepy soul of the forest.

Merriment so mad—

How it carries!

Elfish laughter—

Far out over the wicked waters,

Peals and peals!

And the moonlight wavers, glitters,

Strokes their white throats with its poison;

Makes its streaks and streams of silver

Cold and colder in its joy;

Sinks its sharp, silver-dappled, shining moon-fangs

In their eyes.

Laughing women,

Mad and merry,

Send their voices on the winds;

Calling destiny about them,

Calling to titanic powers:

Till their play,

And their lightness,

And their madness,

And their harsh and eerie laughter

Rouses forces that through aeons

Long have slept—

Slept and waited for a summons

Deep enough,

Wild enough,

Light enough,

And evil enough,

To call them forth.

Slow they stretch their unused muscles—

Answer in a dawning smile.

Three women are laughing in the moonlight,

In the night;

And earth is reeling

In light and shadow.

Air and water,

In some fearful manner,

Mingle

With their voices.

All of nature throngs and rushes

Into the vast,

Chaotic

Drift of sound—

A world of maddened, unchained souls,

Of wicked, savage glee!

Naked Earth

Swings into consciousness,

Uncovered,

Sudden,

Reeling in light and shadow,

Through this hellish, hellish laughter!—

Through this wild,

Malicious,

Evil,

Evil

Laughter!