Читать книгу Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre - Voltairine De Cleyre - Страница 27

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Comrades, what matter the watch-night tells

That a New Year comes or goes?

What to us are the crashing bells

That clang out the Century's close?

What to us is the gala dress?

The whirl of the dancing feet?

The glitter and blare in the laughing press,

And din of the merry street?

Do we not know that our brothers die

In the cold and the dark to-night?

Shelterless faces turned toward the sky

Will not see the New Year's light!

Wandering children, lonely, lost,

Drift away on the human sea,

While the price of their lives in a glass is tossed

And drunk in a revelry!

Ah, know we not in their feasting halls

Where the loud laugh echoes again,

That brick and stone in the mortared walls

Are the bones of murdered men?

Slowly murdered! By day and day,

The beauty and strength are reft,

Till the Man is sapped and sucked away,

And a Human Rind is left!

A Human Rind, with old, thin hair,

And old, thin voice to pray

For alms in the bitter winter air—

A knife at his heart alway.

And the pure in heart are impure in flesh

For the cost of a little food:

Lo, when the Gleaner of Time shall thresh,

Let these be accounted good.

For these are they who in bitter blame

Eat the bread whose salt is sin;

Whose bosoms are burned with the scarlet shame,

Till their hearts are seared within.

The cowardly jests of a hundred years

Will be thrown where they pass to-night,

Too callous for hate, and too dry for tears,

The saddest of human blight.

Do we forget them, these broken ones,

That our watch to-night is set?

Nay, we smile in the face of the year that comes

Because we do not forget.

We do not forget the tramp on the track,

Thrust out in the wind-swept waste,

The curses of Man upon his back,

And the curse of God in his face.

The stare in the eyes of the buried man

Face down in the fallen mine;

The despair of the child whose bare feet ran

To tread out the rich man's wine;

The solemn light in the dying gaze

Of the babe at the empty breast,

The wax accusation, the sombre glaze

Of its frozen and rigid rest;

They are all in the smile that we turn to the east

To welcome the Century's dawn;

They are all in our greeting to Night's high priest,

As we bid the Old Year begone.

Begone and have done, and go down and be dead

Deep drowned in your sea of tears!

We smile as you die, for we wait the red

Morn-gleam of a hundred-years

That shall see the end of the age-old wrong—

The reapers that have not sown—

The reapers of men with their sickles strong

Who gather, but have not strown.

For the earth shall be his and the fruits thereof

And to him the corn and wine,

Who labors the hills with an even love

And knows not "thine and mine."

And the silk shall be to the hand that weaves,

The pearl to him who dives,

The home to the builder; and all life's sheaves

To the builder of human lives.

And none go blind that another see,

Or die that another live;

And none insult with a charity

That is not theirs to give.

For each of his plenty shall freely share

And take at another's hand:

Equals breathing the Common Air

And toiling the Common Land.

A dream? A vision? Aye, what you will;

Let it be to you as it seems:

Of this Nightmare Real we have our fill;

To-night is for "pleasant dreams."

Dreams that shall waken the hope that sleeps

And knock at each torpid Heart

Till it beat drum taps, and the blood that creeps

With a lion's spring upstart!

For who are we to be bound and drowned

In this river of human blood?

Who are we to lie in a swound,

Half sunk in the river mud?

Are we not they who delve and blast

And hammer and build and burn?

Without us not a nail made fast!

Not a wheel in the world should turn!

Must we, the Giant, await the grace

That is dealt by the puny hand

Of him who sits in the feasting place,

While we, his Blind Jest, stand

Between the pillars? Nay, not so:

Aye, if such thing were true,

Better were Gaza again, to show

What the giant's rage may do!

But yet not this: it were wiser far

To enter the feasting hall

And say to the Masters, "These things are

Not for you alone, but all."

And this shall be in the Century

That opes on our eyes to-night;

So here's to the struggle, if it must be,

And to him who fights the fight.

And here's to the dauntless, jubilant throat

That loud to its Comrade sings,

Till over the earth shrills the mustering note,

And the World Strike's signal rings.

Philadelphia, January 1, 1901.