Read "The Gray Victory" by Helen Gray Cone online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
THE QUIET DAYS
On the top of a great rock, / A rounded boulder with rust-colored stains, / Set high over the blue-green of the bay, / Braced strong with iron against the strong salt wind, / The old, gray figurehead is left.
Does any one know who set it there, so high? / Some sailor-fisherman / Who lived in a little hut beside the rock. / The hut is gone, there are the bricks of its foundation, / The old, gray figurehead is left.
A carving crude yet noble, / Of silvery, weathered wood: / A hero-woman, / Large, simple, bold and calm. / One hand is on her breast, her throat curves proudly, / Her head is thrown back proudly, she seems exulting; / There is also in her look something strangely devout, / Patient, and nobly meek.
What far-away workman made her, and what was his meaning? / Was she a Victory? or Hope, or Faith?
She looks upon the sea: / The bitter sea that cast upon these rocks / Her ship of long ago.
Who knows what agony, who knows what loss / Is in her memory? What struggle of sailors / In wild cold waves, at night?
With head thrown back / She looks upon the sea. / In every large curve of her broken body / Is trust, is triumph. / Against the sky she rises, / The light-filled, pure, ineffable azure sky; / Serene, unshaken, / Rises the Victory.