Poems of Purpose | Page 5

will be patient--and use your time.
WHAT THEY SAW
Sad man, Sad man, tell me, pray,?What did you see to-day?
I saw the unloved and unhappy old, waiting for slow delinquent death to come;?Pale little children toiling for the rich, in rooms where sunlight is ashamed to go;?The awful almshouse, where the living dead rot slowly in their hideous open graves.?And there were shameful things.?Soldiers and forts, and industries of death, and devil-ships, and loudwinged devil-birds,?All bent on slaughter and destruction. These and yet more shameful things mine eyes beheld:?Old men upon lascivious conquest bent, and young men living with no thought of God,?And half-clothed women puffing at a weed, aping the vices of the underworld,?Engrossed in shallow pleasures and intent on being barren wives. These things I saw.?(How God must loathe His earth!)
Glad man, Glad man, tell me, pray.?What did you see to-day?
I saw an aged couple, in whose eyes
Shone that deep light of mingled love and faith,?Which makes the earth one room of paradise,
And leaves no sting in death.
I saw vast regiments of children pour,?Rank after rank, out of the schoolroom door?By Progress mobilised. They seemed to say:?'Let ignorance make way.?We are the heralds of a better day.'
I saw the college and the church that stood?For all things sane and good.?I saw God's helpers in the shop and slum?Blazing a path for health and hope to come,?And True Religion, from the grave of creeds,?Springing to meet man's needs.
I saw great Science reverently stand?And listen for a sound from Border-land,
No longer arrogant with unbelief -?Holding itself aloof -?But drawing near, and searching high and low
For that complete and all-convincing proof?Which shall permit its voice to comfort grief,?Saying, 'We know.'
I saw fair women in their radiance rise
And trample old traditions in the dust.?Looking in their clear eyes,?I seemed to hear these words as from the skies:
'He who would father our sweet children must?Be worthy of the trust.'
Against the rosy dawn, I saw unfurled
The banner of the race we usher in,?The supermen and women of the world,
Who make no code of sex to cover sin;?Before they till the soil of parenthood,?They look to it that seed and soil are good.
And I saw, too, that old, old sight, and best -?Pure mothers, with dear babies at the breast.?These things I saw.?(How God must love His earth!)
THE CONVENTION
From the Queen Bee mother, the mother Beast, and the mother Fowl in the fen,?A call went up to the human world, to Woman, the mother of men. The call said, 'Come: for we, the dumb, are given speech for a day, And the things we have thought for a thousand years we are going at last to say.'
Much they marvelled, these women of earth, at the strange and curious call, And some of them laughed, and some of them sneered, but they answered it one and all,?For they wanted to hear what never before was heard since the world began - The spoken word of Beast and Bird, and the message it held for Man.
'A plea for shelter,' the woman said, 'or food in the wintry weathers, Or a foolish request that we be dressed without their furs or feathers. We will do what we can for the poor dumb things, but they must be sensible.' Then?The meeting was called and a she-bear stood and voiced the thought of the fen.
'Now this is the message we give to you' (it was thus the she-bear spake): 'You the creatures of homes and shrines, and we of the wold and brake, We have no churches, we have no schools, and our minds you question and doubt,?But we follow the laws which some Great Cause, alike for us all, laid out.
'We eat and we drink to live; we shun the things that poison and kill, And we settle the problems of sex and birth by the law of the female will, For never was one of us known by a male, or made to mother its kind, Unless there went from our minds consent (or from what we call the mind).
'But you, the highest of all she-things, you gorge yourselves at your feasts,?And you smoke and drink in a way we think would lower the standard of beasts;?For a ring, a roof and a rag, you are bought by your males, to have and to hold,?And you mate and you breed without nature's need, while your hearts and your bodies are cold.
'All unwanted your offspring come, or you slay them before they are born; And now the wild she-things of the earth have spoken and told their scorn. We have no mind and we have no souls, maybe as you think--And still, Never one of us ate or drank the things that poison and kill, And never was one of us known by a male except by our wish and will.'
PROTEST
To