Classic Poem

Famine, pestilence, flood,
Fire, thunder, and quakes
Of the earth, and the blood
Volcanic that breaks

From the hot veins of mountains,
And tempests that plow
The great deep to its fountains —
Does God, thinkest thou,

Heed of thee in thy plaint
That these never choose
Between sinner and saint
Where life is to lose?

Holy Jews, ye that priced
God's life, and decried
The immaculate Christ,
And him crucified;

Ye, with credos for charters
To hunt and to slay,
That re-sainted with martyrs
Bartholomew's day;

Ye that bloodied the ages
With myriad lives' loss
In religion's blind rages
Of Crescent and Cross;

Ye that fire martial leaders
With adulant breath,
Making mothers proud breeders
Of doers of death —

All the civilizations
Of man standing armed,
Nation fronting each nation's
Blood-hunger, alarmed, —

How would dare ye appeal
To God that He make
The brute elements feel
For your human sake?

God is you and in you,
As they and in them;
And shall one of His two
The other condemn?