Classic Poem

POET:

Your face is pale as the earliest dawn
Before the birds have awakened;
Pale as water lilies upon a dark pool.
Your wings wave as the mist of a cataract;
Bearing the rainbow.
Your face is strong. Suffering is the sculptor.

TRUTH:

I am the sword-bearer.
With my sword I will cut the skin from your eyes.

POET:

I see a dark cloud.

TRUTH:

Ignorance, which eats up the light of the world.
So that man flounders to destruction.

POET:

I hear distant thunder.

TRUTH:

Groans of the poor. Lightning will flash.

POET:

I see a monster.
His feet are of gold; his hands are of gold;
Golden is his head and his legs are golden.
But his heart is of clay.
His greedy hands are folded upon
His swollen belly.
Into his maw flows an endless procession:
Men with grey faces; women with sunken eyes;
And the little children who have never laughed.

TRUTH:

Civilization! Power without Soul.

POET:

The God sits within a golden temple,
But squatting on the roof is a great vulture
Whose wings darken the horizon.
Idolaters crowd into the Temple
And circle about the idol, praying.
Their prayer is loud, so that it blows into the street,
And like dust is whirled into every corner:
" O, God of Gold, let nothing be changed.
" Let those who would change the things that are
" Be crucified. "

TRUTH:

Change is the breathing of the Universe.
Nature scorns man's sacred things.
Idolatry is a bandage over the eyes;
A pitfall to the feet of the runner;
There is nothing holy in Nature's eyes.
To her sacrilege may be the greater holiness.
To become sacred is to end, and she is without end.
In her everlasting temple none need kneel.
Forever the upward path is over broken idols.
Man is her child, whom she so loves
That if he heed her not
She will lay him in his grave
As a mother lays her babe in the cradle.
She utters no command but relentlessly
She has established immutable conditions.
The Lightning and the Thunders certify her;
Fire and water obey her;
Night and Day give her praise;
Health, Sickness, Death, are her instruments.
The inevitable Seasons praise her in their rotation.
By freedom she evolved Man's wonderful mechanism.
In the free and backward aeons,
And by freedom only, in the forward aeons
Will she evolve his more wonderful soul.
Noble is the struggle and great the hope.
Not worms and butterflies,
But from worms, butterflies.
One ultimate progression.
The well-ordered garden of Freedom;
Wherein the best shall live; the worst die,
As a gardener culleth.

POET:

The sky is black and thick with terrible stars.
I am afraid.

TRUTH:

The eyes of the poor,
Who before they were born
Were disinherited.
Who has any right to partition out the sea,
Fence the invisible air,
Or claim monopoly in the benediction of the rain?
Is Earth less the general gift than these?
A monster denies you the breast of your mother
And hatches war, snatching young men out of the air.
It gluts on the breasts of mothers.
The people before it are dumb,
And stretch their throats to its fangs.
It parcels the people into obedient flocks.
Wash your eyes in dew from the mountain-top.
Look for the day:
Brotherhood one with Selfhood,
Selfhood with Brotherhood.
The Golden Rule a godly selfishness.
And Freedom shooting sunwise through the sky,
As welcome to the soul as summer morning
To the dawn-mad anarchy of birds.
Even birds make song and puppies laugh.