Armistice Day

I HEARD the trumpets crying ‘Lights out! Lights out!’
and the sun was quenched like a dead candle. The stars
drew night, like a film, across their eyes, and from without
a ship I knew not went sailing, muffled to her spars.

She had no name and no beauty. She was not of those
ships, like armfuls of white fire carelessly tossed on the sea,
tossed like a great unintelligible flower, a blind white rose.
She was a black ship, that went sailing, a strange ship to me.

She carried the hope of the world in her hold like a bale,
and the thin notes of the trumpets were her long wake.
She was unimaginably empty, bitter, and stale,
and the sea of dark that she sailed was more bitter for her sake.

And the trumpets cried ‘Lights out! Lights out!’ And I listened
to their cadence echoing in the hearts of all the lost.
‘Lights out! Lights out!’ they answered, and the words glistened
like a firefly dancing between the ribs of a ghost.

‘Lights out!’ and the trumpets were silent. But out in the dark
the black ship sailed, and those on the further shore
cried as they saw at her masthead glitter a single spark,
and the spark died with the trumpets, and they cried no more.