Читать книгу An Irish Crazy-Quilt - Arthur M. Forrester - Страница 10

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THERE are skeleton homes like gaunt ghosts in the valley;

The hillside swarms thick with anonymous graves,

When the Last Trumpet sounds spectral legions ’twill rally,

Whose corpses are shrouded in ocean’s sad waves.

What hosts of accusers will cluster around him,

What cohorts of famine, of wrong, and despair,

On the white Day of Judgment to blanch and confound him,

That stone-hearted, merciless Lord of Kenmare!

Fond, simple, and trusting, we toiled night and morning

The bountiful prizes of Nature to win,

While he, wild and lustful, God’s providence scorning,

Used virtue’s reward as the guerdon of sin,

Till Heaven, in just anger, rained down on the meadow

Distemper and rot; plagued the soil and the air;

Filled the earth with distress, dimmed the sunlight in shadow,

But touched not that cancerous heart in Kenmare!

When God had been good he reaped all of his bounty;

When Heaven was wrathful the burden was ours,

For the terms of this Lord of Kenmare with the county

Were—the thorns for his serfs, for his harlots the flowers.

And when the poor toiler, beneath his load reeling,

Sank, breathless and faint, on his cabin floor bare,

The noose for his cattle, the torch for his sheeling,

Were the pity he found from the Lord of Kenmare.

Our fortune enriched him: he coined our disaster—

This lord of our sinews, our houses, our grounds,

Who felt himself monarch, and knew himself master—

A monarch of slaves, and a master of hounds!

He held not his hand, and he spared not his scourges;

He laughed at the shriek, and he scoffed at the prayer

That Kerry’s green swards and Atlantic’s white surges

Sobbed and wailed, sighed and moaned, ’gainst the Lord of Kenmare!

He has gone from the orgies where once he held revel,

Age and youth hunts no more as legitimate game,

But Ireland to-day finds the work of the devil

Still essayed by an imp of his lineage and name.

Tried only, thank God, for the serf has gained reason,

The fool learned to think, and the coward to dare,

And no longer the wolf-cry of “danger” and “treason”

Wraps in mist the misdeeds of the lords of Kenmare.

Hope’s phosphorent rays light that desolate valley;

Truth’s sunbeams illumine those derelict graves;

The stern blast of Justice’s bugle will rally

Avengers for every corpse ’neath the waves.

Two hemispheres judge as a pitiless jury,

Nor culprit nor crime will their firm verdict spare,

Oh, vain your derision and wasted your fury,

The world writes your sentence, false Lord of Kenmare!