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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
Clinton Scollard: Selections on war and peace
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Clinton Scollard
In The Night
Sometimes grim horror grips me in the night
When I am fain of sleep, when I am fain
Of surcease from the thought of woe and pain
Where fields once fair are stricken with the blight
And whelm of battle; then across my sight
Pale phantoms march, a melancholy train,
The unhouselled ghosts of the unnumbered slain
That mark Mars’ mad and holocaustal rite.
What will the end be? Can no puissant power,
Man’s dream and hope from some dim elder day,
With hand compassionate, exorcize the spell?
Or have we fallen on that awful hour
When hosts satanic, in their dire array.
Menace the world from out the yawn of hell?
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