My Lord, at last you have it! Now we know
Truth’s not a phrase, justice an idle show.
Your life ran red with murder, green with lust.
Blood has washed blood clean, and, in the final dust
Your carrion will be purified. Yet, see,
Though your body perish, for your soul shall be
An immortality of infamy!
“ANARCHISM.”
’Tis not when I am here,
In these homeless homes,
Where sin and shame and disease
And foul death comes;
’Tis not when heart and brain
Would be still and forget
Men and women and children
Dragged down to the pit:
But when I hear them declaiming
Of “liberty,” “order,” and “law,”
The husk-hearted gentleman
And the mud-hearted bourgeois,
That a sombre hateful desire
Burns up slow in my breast
To wreck the great guilty temple,
And give us rest!
BELGRAVIA BY NIGHT.
“MOVE ON!”
“The foxes have holes,
And the birds of the air have nests,
But where shall the heads of the sons of men
Be laid, be laid?”
“_Where the cold corpse rests_,
_Where the sightless moles_
_Burrow and yet cannot make it afraid_,
_Rout but cannot wake it again_,
_There shall the heads of the sons of men_
_Be laid_, _laid_!”
JESUS.
Where is poor Jesus gone?
He sits with Dives now,
And not even the crumbs are flung
To Lazarus below.
Where is poor Jesus gone?
Is he with Magdalen?
He doles her one by one
Her wages of shame!
Where is poor Jesus gone?
The good Samaritan,
What does he there alone?
He stabs the wounded man!
Where is poor Jesus gone,
The lamb they sacrificed?
They’ve made God of his carrion
And labelled it “Christ!”
PARALLELS FOR THE PIOUS.
“He holds a pistol to my head,
Swearing that he will shoot me dead,
If he have not my purse instead,
The robber!”
“_He_, _with the lash of wealth and power_,
_Flogs out my heart and flings the dower_,
_The plundered pittance of his hour_,
_The robber_!”
“He shakes his serpent tongue that lies,
Wins trust for poisoned sophistries
And stabs me in the dark, and flies,
The assassin!”
“_He pits me in the dreadful fight_
_Against my fellow_. _Then he quite_
_Strips both his victims in the night_,
_The assassin_!”
“PRAYER.”
This is what I pray
In this horrible day,
In this terrible night,
God will give me light.
Such as I have had,
That I go not mad.
This is what I seek,
God will keep me meek
Till mine eyes behold,
Till my lips have told
All this hellish crime.—
_Then it’s sleeping time_!
TO THE CHRISTIANS.
Take, then, your paltry Christ,
Your gentleman God.
_We_ want the carpenter’s son,
With his saw and hod.
_We_ want the man who loved
The poor and oppressed,
Who hated the rich man and king
And the scribe and the priest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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