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 have made us more? Do you curse the bloom of the heather wild? Do you trample the flowers and cry "impure"? Do you shun the bird-songs' silver shower? Does their music arouse your curling scorn That none but God blessed them? The whitest flower, The purest song, were but "bastard born"! _This is my sin_,--I was born of her! _This is my crime_,--that I reverence deep! God, that her pale corpse may not stir, Press closer down on her lids--the sleep! Would you have me hate her? Me, who knew That the gentlest soul in the world looked there, Out of the gray eyes that pitied you E'en while you cursed her? The long brown hair That waved from her forehead, has brushed my cheek, When her soft lips have drunk up my salt of grief; And the voice, whose echo you hate, would speak The hush of pity and love's relief! And those still hands that are folded now Have touched my sorrows for years away! Would you have me question her whence and how The love-light streamed from her heart's deep ray?