Classic Poem

From the peaceful heights of a higher life
I heard your maddening cry of strife;
It quivered with anguish, wrath and pain,
Like a demon struggling with his chain

A chain of evil, heavy and strong,
Rusted with ages of fearful wrong,
Encrusted with blood and burning tears,
The chain I had worn and dragged for years.

It clasped my limbs, but it bound your heart,
And formed of your life a fearful part;
You sowed the wind, but could not control
The tempest wild of a guilty soul.

You saw me stand with my broken chain
Forged in the furnace of fiery pain,
You saw my children around me stand
Lovingly clasping my unbound hand.

But you remembered my blood and tears
'Mid the weary wasting flight of years,
You thought of the rice swamps, lone and dank,
When my heart in hopeless anguish sank.

You thought of your fields with harvest white,
Where I toiled in pain from morn till night;
You thought of the days you bought and sold
The children I loved, for paltry gold.

You thought of our shrieks that rent the air—
Our mourns of anguish and deep despair;
With chattering teeth and paling face,
You thought of your nation's deep disgrace.

You wove from your fears a fearful fate
To spring from your seeds of scorn and hate;
You imagined the saddest, wildest thing,
That time, with revenges fierce, could bring.

The cry you thought from a Voodo breast
Was the echo of your soul's unrest;
When thoughts too sad for fruitless tears
Loomed like the ghosts of avenging years.

Oh prophet of evil, could not your voice
In our new hopes and freedom rejoice?
'Mid the light which streams around our way
Was there naught to see but an evil day?

Nothing but vengeance, wrath and hate,
And the serpent coils of an evil fate—
A fate that shall crush and drag you down;
A doom that shall press like an iron crown?

A fate that shall crisp and curl your hair
And darken your faces now as fair,
And send through your veins like a poisoned flood
The hated stream of the Negro's blood?

A fate to madden the heart and brain
You've peopled with phantoms of dread and pain,
And fancies wild of your daughter's shriek
With Congo kisses upon her cheek?

Beyond the mist of your gloomy fears,
I see the promise of brighter years,
Through the dark I see their golden hem
And my heart gives out its glad amen.

The banner of Christ was your sacred trust,
But you trailed that banner in the dust,
And mockingly told us amid our pain
The hand of your God had forged our chain.

We stumbled and groped through the dreary night
Till our fingers touched God's robe of light;
And we knew he heard, from his lofty throne,
Our saddest cries and faintest moan.

The cross you have covered with sin and shame
We'll bear aloft in Christ's holy name
Oh, never again may its folds be furled
While sorrow and sin enshroud our world!

God, to whose fingers thrills each heart beat,
Has not sent us to walk with aimless feet,
To cower and couch with bated breath
From margins of life to shores of death.

Higher and better than hate for hate,
Like the scorpion fangs that desolate,
Is the hope of a brighter, fairer morn
And a peace and love that shall yet be born;

When the Negro shall hold an honored place,
The friend and helper of every race;
His mission to build and not destroy,
And gladden the world with love and joy.