Augustin S. Macdonald, comp. A Collection of Verse by California Poets. 1914.
By George SterlingNight-Sentries
E
Called or uncalled you take your kindred posts.
At helm and lever, wheel and switch you stand,
On the world’s wastes and melancholy coasts.
Strength to the patient hand!
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
How many watchers guard the barren way,
In signal-towers, at stammering keys, to mark
What word the whispering horizons say!
To all that see and hark,—
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
(Half hated by the blinded ones you guard)
Guard well, lest crime unheeded enter in!
The dark is cruel and the vigil hard.
The hours of guilt begin.
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
Gaze onward, anxious eyes, to mist or star!
Where foams the heaving highway wide and free?
Where wait the reef, the berg, the cape, the bar?
Whatever menace be,
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
And grave patrols are at the ocean-edge.
Now soars the rocket where the billows grind,
Discerned too late, on sunken shoal or ledge.
To all that seek and find,—
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
Star-steady, or a-blink like dragon-eyes.
Govern your rays, or wake the giant horn
Within the fog that welds the sea and skies!
Far distant runs the morn:
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
Where nurse and doctor watch the joyless breath,
Drawn in a sigh, and sighing lost again.
Who waits without the threshhold, Life or Death?
Reckon you loss or gain?
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
To you that constant in the past have stood!
To you by whom the future shall avow
Unconquerable fortitude and good!
Upon the sleepless brow
Of each, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!