Contender

Icicle-cold are your slender fingers
Glassy cold are your motionless eyes
Cold as a wind in a wintry rhythm
Frozenly gracile your body lies.

It will take spring from a far, far planet,
It will take hammers of Vulcan and Thor
To melt stalactites back into fingers,
To pound glass globes into eyes once more.

It will take music -and who can make it?
Strange, compelling, supernally strong,
To lift in a rhythm of tall and dancing
What lies here static and low and long.

It will take spring, and strength and singing,
And words more potent than any said . . . .
Where can be found the almighty Contender
To wield such weapons, and raise the dead?

Kansas Poets
Edited by May Williams Ward
(New York: Henry Harrison. 1935)
Page 192