Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre. Voltairine De Cleyre

And the burden

       Hardly to be borne!

       Wearily grows, O People,

       All the aching

       Of thy pierced heart, bruised and torn!

       But yet thy time is not,

       And low thy moaning.

       Desert thy sands!

       Not yet is thy breath hot,

       Vengefully blowing;

       It wafts o'er lifted hands.

      The tide has turned; the vane veers slowly round;

       Slow clouds are sweeping o'er the blinding light;

       White crests curl on the sea—its voice grows deep.

      Angry thy heart, O People,

       And its bleeding

       Fire-tipped with rising hate!

       Thy clasped hands part, O People,

       For thy praying

       Warmed not the desolate!

       God did not hear thy moan:

       Now it is swelling

       To a great drowning cry;

       A dark wind-cloud, a groan,

       Now backward veering

       From that deaf sky!

      The tide flows in, the wind roars from the depths,

       The whirled-white sand heaps with the foam-white waves;

       Thundering the sea rolls o'er its shell-crunched wall!

      Strong is thy rage, O People,

       In its fury

       Hurling thy tyrants down!

       Thou metest wage, O People.

       Very swiftly,

       Now that thy hate is grown:

       Thy time at last is come;

       Thou heapest anguish,

       Where thou thyself wert bare!

       No longer to thy dumb

       God clasped and kneeling,

       Thou answerest thine own prayer.

      Sea Isle City, N. J., August, 1889.

[A] Since the death of the author this poem has been put to music by the young American composer, George Edwards.

UT SEMENTEM FECERIS, ITA METES

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      (To the Czar, on a woman, a political prisoner, being flogged to death in Siberia.)

      How many drops must gather to the skies

       Before the cloud-burst comes, we may not know;

       How hot the fires in under hells must glow

       Ere the volcano's scalding lavas rise,

       Can none say; but all wot the hour is sure!

       Who dreams of vengeance has but to endure!

       He may not say how many blows must fall,

       How many lives be broken on the wheel,

       How many corpses stiffen 'neath the pall,

       How many martyrs fix the blood-red seal;

       But certain is the harvest time of Hate!

       And when weak moans, by an indignant world

       Re-echoed, to a throne are backward hurled,

       Who listens, hears the mutterings of Fate!

      Philadelphia, February, 1890.

BASTARD BORN

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      Why do you clothe me with scarlet of shame?

       Why do you point with your finger of scorn?

       What is the crime that you hissingly name

       When you sneer in my ears, "Thou bastard born?"

      Am I not as the rest of you,

       With a hope to reach, and a dream to live?

       With a soul to suffer, a heart to know

       The pangs that the thrusts of the heartless give?

      I am no monster! Look at me—

       Straight in my eyes, that they do not shrink!

       Is there aught in them you can see

       To merit this hemlock you make me drink?

      This poison that scorches my soul like fire,

       That burns and burns until love is dry,

       And I shrivel with hate, as hot as a pyre,

       A corpse, while its smoke curls up to the sky?

      Will you touch my hand? It is flesh like yours;

       Perhaps a little more brown and grimed,

       For it could not be white while the drawers' and hewers',

       My brothers, were calloused and darkened and slimed.

      Yet touch it! It is no criminal's hand!

       No children are toiling to keep it fair!

       It is free from the curse of the stolen land,

       It is clean of the theft of the sea and air!

      It has set no seals to a murderous law,

       To sign a bitter, black league with death!

       No covenants false do these fingers draw

       In the name of "The State" to barter Faith!

      It bears no stain of the yellow gold

       That earth's wretches give as the cost of heaven!

       No priestly garment of silken fold

       I wear as the price of their "sins forgiven"!

      Still do you shrink! Still I hear the hiss

       Between your teeth, and I feel the scorn

       That flames in your gaze! Well, what is this,

       This crime I commit, being "bastard born"?

      What! You whisper my "eyes are gray,"

       The "color of hers," up there on the hill,

       Where the white stone gleams, and the willow spray

       Falls over her grave in the starlight still!

      My "hands are shaped like" those quiet hands,

       Folded away from their life, their care;

       And the sheen that lies on my short, fair strands

       Gleams darkly down on her buried hair!

      My voice is toned like that silent tone

       That might, if it could, break up through the sod

       With such rebuke as would shame your stone,

       Stirring the grass-roots in their clod!

      And my heart-beats thrill to the same strong chords;

       And the blood that was hers is mine to-day;

       And the thoughts she loved, I love; and the words

       That meant most to her, to me most say!

      She was my mother—I her child! Could ten thousand priests