Text: Thanksgiving for Heroes

Eric Davis (b. 1966)
Poetry: Edwin Markham (1852–1940)

O bugles, ripple and shine,
Calling the heroes home from the battleline.
Praise, praise, praise,
For the last of the desperate days!
Shake out the lyrical notes
From the silvery deep of your throats.
Burst into joy-mad carols: tell again
The story of heroic men.

Glad are the love-birds in the leafy tree,
But none so glad as we.
High leap the rock-flung billows to the sky,
But none leaps up so gladly and wildly high
As our jubilant hearts.
The Fear that crouched upon the world departs,
And Joy comes back pavilioned by the sun.
Let all the mountains clap their hands and run:
Let all the oceans from their throats of thunder
Shout to the streams and storms and stars the wonder!
Sing and be glad, O nations, in these hours:
Blow clarions from all towers!

Let bright horns revel and the joy-bells rave;
Yet there are lips whose smile is ever vain
And wild wet eyes behind the window pane,
For whom the whole world dwindles to one grave,
A lone grave at the mercy of the rain.
Sing softly, then, as though the mouth of Grief,
Remembering all the agony and wrong,
Should stir with mighty song.
Not all the glad averment of the guns,
Not all our odes, nor all our orisons,
Can sweeten these intolerable tears,
These silences that fall between the cheers.

Praise, praise, praise,
Praise for the living, honour for the dead—
Praise for the wreathed and the wreath-less head.
Praise and victorious peace
On hearts that beat and on the hearts that cease—
Peace on the mortal and the immortal way—
Peace on the heroes vanished from our day,
Called onward from these bounds of fleeting breath
To join the old democracy of death.

And yet our hearts must sing,
Carol and clamour like the tides of Spring.

Give thanks, O heart, for the high souls
That point us to the deathless goals—
For all the courage of their cry
That echoes down from sky to sky;
Thanksgiving for the armed seers
And heroes called to mortal years—
Souls that have built our faith in man,
And lit the ages as they ran.

The company of souls supreme,
The conscripts of the mighty Dream.
Give thanks for heroes that have stirred
Earth with the wonder of a word.
But all thanksgiving for the breed
Who have bent destiny with deed—
Souls of the high, heroic birth,
Souls sent to poise the shaken Earth,
And then called back to God again
To make heaven possible for men.

Take at our hands this humble wreath of praise
For all the toil and victory of your days.
Take this poor wreath: ‘tis all we have to give
To those that nobly serve and nobly live.