The Road to the Spring: Collected Poems of Mary Austin

The Mill Wheel

394 The Mill Wheel So slow they are, the mills of God a-turning To grind out the happier grist,— How long the people will be, Lord, in earning The wages they have missed! They have given to Thy waters all their weeping And their blood to overflow, In the darkness they can hear the millrace sweeping And the mill wheel turning slow. On the threshing floor like patient muzzled cattle They have trodden out the corn, Where the earth is red with dewing of old battle In keen days ere they were born. “Not for ourselves,” they say, “would we be minding To drop down and die unfed, But for our children, Lord, with all this grinding Will you give them stones for bread? “Not for ourselves but for the young, young races, That come crowding at the birth, We are stricken at the wheel to give them places In the choked and acrid earth. And we go down to the grave in mighty numbers, Sick, before our time, to go, But the grinding does not vex us in our slumbers, And the mill wheel turneth slow.” How long, O Lord, the people will be learning What is cast into their teeth, That never wheel goes forward in its turning If the dead drag underneath. For they rise up from the choked and swollen sluices Sodden things that clog and bind, 395 In the spume of outworn manners and old uses, And the grist will never grind. Goes not forward though the fecund earth has quickened The young, white, strong-leaping springs, For their mingling waters mantle, fouled and thickened By all old unhappy things. Mummied laws that have no Truth to thrill them, And no power to waste or rot, Husks of promises that have no Hope to fill them, And the grist it grindeth not. What faiths have they, and are not most beholden To the ashen dead for them, Their very God has thumbprints, left by moulding Hands that struck the tents of Shem, And they do His work on earth by funeral tapers, Is no sun nor starshine overhead In their firmament of baleful graveyard vapors, And their saints are also dead. How long with sick men’s hearts will they be groping The pale fields of Proserpine, To sow salt barren acres, and be hoping From withered grapes new wine. Go hence and clear your rivers for God’s torrents Till his whirlwinds dredge their slime, And the dead past let go seaward with the currents Of a younger fuller time. The young waters are the sweetest in their flowing, The young sap makes fairest fruit, The young blood has fullest pulse and ruddiest showing The young tree takes quickest root; And the young young races were it merely 396 For young scorn of such as we Will grind out the finer grist and not be weary Let them be, let them be. The mills of God turn slowly, labored, droning And the grist is hard to grind. But they go not any faster for your groaning You whom grave clothes chafe and bind. Go not forward in the sweating and the weeping For the rotting dead below, They have stifled in the race, the waters sweeping, And the mill wheel turneth slow. Editor’s Notes AU 381 ...