People be heard!
O⸺” You strangled it with your rope!
Denied the last dying word,
While your Trap and your Gallows spoke!
But a thousand voices rise
Where the words of the martyr fell;
The seed springs fast to the Skies
Watered deep from that bloody well!
Hark! Low down you will hear
The storm in the underground!
Listen, Tyrants, and fear!
Quake at that muffled sound!
“Heavens, that mocked our dust,
Smile on, in your pitiless blue!
Silent as you are to us,
So silent are we to you!
“Churches that scourged our brains!
Priests that locked fast our hands!
We planted the torch in your chains:
Now gather the burning brands!
“States that have given us law,
When we asked for the right to earn bread!
The Sword that Damocles saw
By a hair swings over your head!
“What ye have sown ye shall reap:
Teardrops, and Blood, and Hate,
Gaunt gather before your Seat,
And knock at your palace gate!
“There are murderers on your Thrones!
There are thieves in your Justice-halls!
White Leprosy cancers their stones,
And gnaws at their worm-eaten walls!
“And the Hand of Belshazzar’s Feast
Writes over, in flaming light:
Thought’s kingdom no more to the Priest;
Nor the Law of Right unto Might.”
John P. Altgeld
(After an incarceration of six long years in Joliet state prison for an act of which they were entirely innocent, namely, the throwing of the Haymarket bomb, in Chicago, May 4th, 1886, Oscar Neebe, Michael Schwab and Samuel Fielden, were liberated by Gov. Altgeld, who thus sacrificed his political career to an act of justice.)
There was a tableau! Liberty’s clear light
Shone never on a braver scene than that.
Here was a prison, there a Man who sat
High in the Halls of state! Beyond, the might
Of ignorance and Mobs, whose hireling press
Yells at their bidding like the slaver’s hounds,
Ready with coarse caprice to curse or bless,
To make or unmake rulers!—Lo, there sounds
A grating of the doors! And three poor men,
Helpless and hated, having naught to give,
Come from their long-sealed tomb, look up, and live,
And thank this Man that they are free again.
And He—to all the world this Man dares say,
“Curse as you will! I have been just this day.”
The Cry of the Unfit
The gods have left us, the creeds have crumbled;
There are none to pity and none to care:
Our fellows have crushed us where we have stumbled;
They have made of our bodies a bleeding stair.
Loud rang the bells in the Christmas steeples;
We heard them ring through the bitter morn:
The promise of old to the weary peoples
Came floating sweetly—“Christ is born.”
But the words were mocking, sorely mocking,
As we sought the sky through our freezing tears,
We children, who’ve hung the Christmas stocking,
And found it empty two thousand years.
No, there is naught in the old creed for us;
Love and peace are to those who win;
To them the delight of the golden chorus,
To us the hunger and shame and sin.
Why then live on since our lives are fruitless,
Since peace is certain and death is rest;
Since our masters tell us the strife is bootless,
And Nature scorns her unwelcome guest?
You who have climbed on our aching bodies,
You who have thought because we have toiled,
Priests of the creed of a newer goddess,
Searchers in depths where the Past was foiled.
Speak in the name of the faith that you cherish!
Give us the truth! We have bought it with woe!
Must we forever thus worthlessly perish,
Burned in the desert and lost in the snow?
Trampled, forsaken, foredoomed, and forgotten—
Helplessly tossed like the leaf in the storm?
Bred for the shambles, with curses begotten,
Useless to all save the rotting grave-worm?
Give us some anchor to stay our mad drifting!
Give, for your own sakes! for lo, where our blood,
A red tide to drown you, is steadily lifting!
Help! or you die in the terrible flood!
Back to thy breast, O Mother, turns thy child,
He whom thou garmentedst in steel of truth,
And sent forth, strong in the glad heart of youth,
To sing the wakening song in ears beguiled
By tyrants’ promises and flatterers’ smiles;
These searched his eyes, and knew nor threats nor wiles
Might shake the steady stars within their blue,
Nor win one truckling word from off those lips—
No—not for gold nor praise, nor aught men do
To dash the Sun of Honor with eclipse,
O Mother Liberty, those eyes are dark,
And the brave lips are white and cold and dumb;
But fair in other souls, through time to come,
Fanned by thy breath glows the Immortal Spark.
The Wandering Jew
(The above poem was suggested by the reading of an article describing an interview with the “wandering Jew,” in which he was represented as an incorrigible grumbler. The Jew has been, and will continue to be, the grumbler of earth—until the prophetic ideal of justice shall be realized: “Blessed be he.”)
“Go on.”—“Thou shalt go on till I come.”
Pale, ghostly Vision from the coffined years,
Planting the cross with thy world-wandering feet,
Stern Watcher through the centuries’ storm and beat,
In those sad eyes, between those grooves of tears—
Those eyes like caves where sunlight never dwells
And stars but dimly shine—stand sentinels
That watch with patient hope, through weary days,
That somewhere, sometime, He indeed may “come,”
And thou at last find thee a resting place,
Blast-driven leaf of Man, within the tomb.
Aye, they have cursed thee with the bitter curse,
And driven thee with scourges o’er the world;
Tyrants have crushed thee, Ignorance has hurled
Its black anathema;—but Death’s pale hearse,
That bore them graveward, passed them silently;
And vainly didst thou stretch thy hands and cry,
“Take me instead”;—not yet for thee the time,
Not yet—not yet: thy bruised and mangled limbs
Must still drag on, still feed the Vulture, Crime,
With bleeding flesh, till rust its steel beak dims.
Aye, “till He come,”—He—freedom, justice, peace—
Till then shalt thou cry warning through the earth,
Unheeding
