57624: Mental Cases

<p dir="ltr"> Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?<br> Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,<br> Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,<br> Baring teeth that leer like skulls' teeth wicked?<br> Stroke on stroke of pain,---but what slow panic,<br> Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?<br> Ever from their hair and through their hands' palms<br> Misery swelters. Surely we have perished<br> Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?<br> ---These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.<br> Memory fingers in their hair of murders,<br> Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.<br> Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,<br> Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.<br> Always they must see these things and hear them,<br> Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,<br> Carnage incomparable, and human squander<br> Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.<br> Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented<br> Back into their brains, because on their sense<br> Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black;<br> Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.<br> ---Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,<br> Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.<br> ---Thus their hands are plucking at each other;<br> Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;<br> Snatching after us who smote them, brother,<br> Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.</p>