From the Earth, a Cry
CAN the earth have a voice? Can the clods have speech,
To murmur and rail at the demigods?
Trample them! Grind their vulgar faces in the clay!
The earth was made for lords and the makers of law;
For the conquerors and the social priest;
For traders who feed on and foster the complex life;
For the shrewd and the selfish who plan and keep;
For the heirs who squander the hoard that bears
The face of the king, and the blood of the serf,
And the curse of the darkened souls!
O Christ! and O Christ! In thy name the law!
In thy mouth the mandate! In thy loving hand the whip!
They have taken thee down from thy cross and sent thee to scourge the people;
They have shod thy feet with spikes and jointed thy dead knees with iron,
And pushed thee, hiding behind, to trample the poor dumb faces!
The spheres make music in space. They swing
Like fiery cherubim on their paths, circling their suns,
Mysterious, weaving the irrevealable,
Full of the peace of unity—sphere and its life at one—
Humming their lives of love through the limitless waste of creation.
God! thou hast made man a test of Thyself!
Thou hast set in him a heart that bleeds at the cry of the helpless:
Through Thine infinite seas one world rolls silent,
Moaning at times with quivers and fissures of blood;
Divided, unhappy, accursed; the lower life good,
But the higher life wasted and split, like grain with a cankered root.
Is there health in thy gift of life, Almighty?
Is there grief or compassion anywhere for the poor?
If these be, there is guerdon for those who hate the wrong
And leap naked on the spears, that blood may cry
For truth to come, and pity, and Thy peace.
The human sea is frozen like a swamp; and the kings
And the heirs and the owners ride on the ice and laugh.
Their war-forces, orders, and laws are the crusted field of a crater,
And they stamp on the fearful rind, deriding its flesh-like shudder.
Lightning! the air is split, the crater bursts, and the breathing
Of those below is the fume and fire of hatred.
The thrones are stayed with the courage of shotted guns.
The warning dies.
But queens are dragged to the block, and the knife of the guillotine sinks
In the garbage of pampered flesh that gluts its bed and its hinges.
Silence again, and sunshine. The gaping lips are closed on the crater.
The dead are below, and the landless, and those who live to labor
And grind forever in gloom that the privileged few may live.
[...] Read more
poem by John Boyle O'Reilly
Added by Poetry Lover
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