Poetry

and earthly shame brings a higher pay.
Sometimes I was tempted to give it up, and go, like others, the easier way;
But I didn’t; no, sir, I kept my oath, though my baby lay in my arms and cried,
And at last, to spare it⁠—I poisoned it; and kissed its murdered lips when it died.
I’d never seen him since it was born (he’d said that it wasn’t his, you know);
But I took its body and laid it down at the steps of his door, in the pallid glow
Of the winter morning; and when he came, with a love-tune hummed on those lips of lies,
It lay at his feet, with its pinched white face staring up at him from its dead, blue eyes;
I hadn’t closed them; they were like his, and so was the mouth and the curled gold hair,
And every feature so like his own⁠—for I am dark, sir, and he is fair.
’Twas a moment of triumph, that showed me yet there was a passion I could feel,
When I saw him bend o’er its meagre form, and, starting backwards, cry out and reel!
If there is a time when all souls shall meet the reward of the deeds that are done in the clay,
When accused and accuser stand face to face, he will cry out so in the Judgment Day!

The rest? Oh, nothing. They hunted me, and with virtuous lawyers’ virtuous tears
To a virtuous jury, convicted me; and I’m sentenced to stay here for twenty years.
Do I repent? Yes, I do; but wait till I tell you of what I repent, and why.
I repent that I ever believed a man could be anything but a living lie!
I repent because every noble thought, or hope, or ambition, or earthly trust,
Is as dead as dungeon-bleached bones in me⁠—as dead as my child in its murdered dust!
Do I repent that I killed the babe? Am I repentant for that, you ask?
I’ll answer the truth as I feel it, sir; I leave to others the pious mask.
Am I repentant because I saved its starving body from Famine’s teeth?
Because I hastened what time would do, to spare it pain and relieve its death?
Am I repentant because I held it were better a grave should have no name
Than a living being, whose only care must come from a mother weighed with shame?
Am I repentant because I thought it were better the tiny form lay hid
From the heartless stings of a brutal world, unknown, unnamed, ’neath a coffin lid?
Am I repentant for the act, the last on earth in my power, to save
From the long-drawn misery of life, in the early death and the painless grave?
I’m glad that I did it! Start if you will! I’ll repeat it over; I say I’m glad!
No, I’m neither a fiend, nor a maniac⁠—don’t look as if I were going mad!

Did I not love it? Yes, I loved with a strength that you, sir, can never feel;
It’s only a strong love can kill to save, though itself be torn where time cannot heal.
You see my hands⁠—they are red with its blood! Yet I would have cut them, bit by bit,
And fed them, and smiled to see it eat, if that would have saved and nourished it!
“Beg!” I did beg⁠—and “pray!” I did pray! God was as stony and hard as Earth,
And Christ was as deaf as the stars that watched, or the night that darkened above his birth!
And I⁠—I feel stony now, too, like them; deaf to sorrow and mute to grief!
Am I heartless?⁠—yes:⁠—it-is-all-cut-out! Torn! Gone! All gone! Like my dead belief.

Do I not fear for the judgment hour? So unrepentant, so hard and cold?
Wait! It is little I trust in that; but if ever the scrolled sky shall be uprolled,
And the lives of men shall be read and known, and their acts be judged by their very worth,
And the Christ you speak of shall come again, and the thunders of Justice shake the earth,
You will hear the cry, “Who murdered here? Come forth to the judgment, false heart and eyes,
That pulsed with accursèd strength of lust, and loaded faith with envenomed lies!
Come forth to the judgment, haughty dames, who scathed the mother with your scorn,
And answer here, to the poisoned child, who decreed its murder ere it was born?
Come forth to the judgment ye who heaped the gold of earth in your treasured hoard,
And answer, ‘guilty,’ to those who stood all naked and starving, beneath your board.
Depart, accursèd! I know you not! Ye heeded not the command of Heaven,
‘Unto the least of these ye give, it is even unto the Master given.’ ”

Judgment! Ah, sir, to see that day, I’d willingly pass thro’ a hundred hells!
I’d believe, then, the Justice that hears each voice buried alive in these prison cells!
But, no⁠—it’s not that; that will never be! I trusted too long, and He answered not.
There is no avenging God on high!⁠—we live, we struggle, and⁠—we rot.

Yet does Justice come! and, O Future Years! sorely ye’ll reap, and in weary pain,
When ye garner the sheaves that are sown to-day, when the clouds that are gathering fall in rain!
The time will come, aye! the time will come, when the child ye conceive in lust and shame,
Quickened, will mow you like swaths of grass, with a sickle born of Steel and Flame.
Aye, tremble, shrink, in your drunken den, coward, traitor, and Child of Lie!
The unerring avenger stands close to you, and the dread hour of parturition’s nigh!
Aye! wring your hands, for the air is black! thickly the cloud-troops whirl and swarm!
See! yonder, on the horizon’s verge, play the lightning-shafts of the coming storm!

Adrian, Mich., July, 1889.

Optimism

There’s a love supreme in the great hereafter,
The buds of earth are blooms in heaven;
The smiles of the world are ripples of laughter
When back to its Aidenn the soul is given:
And the tears of the world, though long in flowing,
Water the fields of the bye-and-bye;
They fall as dews on the sweet grass growing
When the fountains of sorrow and grief run dry.
Though