641

Size circumscribes—it has no room
For petty furniture—
The Giant tolerates no Gnat
For Ease of Gianture—

Repudiates it, all the more—
Because intrinsic size
Ignores the possibility
Of Calumnies—or Flies.

Oh! could I hope the wise and pure in heart
Might hear my song without a frown, nor deem
My voice unworthy of the theme it tries,--
I would take up the hymn to Death, and say
To the grim power, The world hath slandered thee
And mocked thee. On thy dim and shadowy brow
They place an iron crown, and call thee king
Of terrors, and the spoiler of the world,
Deadly assassin, that strik'st down the fair,
The loved, the good--that breath'st upon the lights
Of virtue set along the vale of life,
And they go out in darkness. I am come,
Not with reproaches, not with cries and prayers,
Such as have stormed thy stern insensible ear
From the beginning. I am come to speak
Thy praises. True it is, that I have wept
Thy conquests, and may weep them yet again:
And thou from some I love wilt take a life
Dear to me as my own. Yet while the spell
Is on my spirit, and I talk with thee
In sight of all thy trophies, face to face,
Meet is it that my voice should utter forth

Thy nobler triumphs: I will teach the world
To thank thee.--Who are thine accusers?--Who?
The living!--they who never felt thy power,
And know thee not. The curses of the wretch
Whose crimes are ripe, his sufferings when thy hand
Is on him, and the hour he dreads is come,
Are writ among thy praises. But the good--
Does he whom thy kind hand dismissed to peace,
Upbraid the gentle violence that took off
His fetters, and unbarred his prison cell?
Raise then the Hymn to Death. Deliverer!
God hath anointed thee to free the oppressed
And crush the oppressor. When the armed chief,
The conqueror of nations, walks the world,
And it is changed beneath his feet, and all
Its kingdoms melt into one mighty realm--
Thou, while his head is loftiest, and his heart
Blasphemes, imagining his own right hand
Almighty, sett'st upon him thy stern grasp,
And the strong links of that tremendous chain
That bound mankind are crumbled; thou dost break
Sceptre and crown, and beat his throne to dust.
Then the earth shouts with gladness, and her tribes
Gather within their ancient bounds again.
Else had the mighty of the olden time,
******, Sesostris, or the youth who feigned
His birth from Lybian Ammon, smote even now
The nations with a rod of iron, and driven
Their chariot o'er our necks. Thou dost avenge,
In thy good time, the wrongs of those who know

No other friend. Nor dost thou interpose
Only to lay the sufferer asleep,
Where he who made him wretched troubles not
His rest--thou dost strike down his tyrant too.
Oh, there is joy when hands that held the scourge
Drop lifeless, and the pitiless heart is cold.
Thou too dost purge from earth its horrible
And old idolatries; from the proud fanes
Each to his grave their priests go out, till none
Is left to teach their worship; then the fires
Of sacrifice are chilled, and the green moss
O'ercreeps their altars; the fallen images
Cumber the weedy courts, and for loud hymns,
Chanted by kneeling crowds, the chiding winds
Shriek in the solitary aisles. When he
Who gives his life to guilt, and laughs at all
The laws that God or man has made, and round
Hedges his seat with power, and shines in wealth,--
Lifts up his atheist front to scoff at Heaven,
And celebrates his shame in open day,
Thou, in the pride of all his crimes, cutt'st off
The horrible example. Touched by thine,
The extortioner's hard hand foregoes the gold
Wrong from the o'er-worn poor. The perjurer,
Whose tongue was lithe, e'en now, and voluble
Against his neighbour's life, and he who laughed
And leaped for joy to see a spotless fame
Blasted before his own foul calumnies,
Are smit with deadly silence. He, who sold
His conscience to preserve a worthless life,

Even while he hugs himself on his escape,
Trembles, as, doubly terrible, at length,
Thy steps o'ertake him, and there is no time
For parley--nor will bribes unclench thy grasp.
Oft, too, dost thou reform thy victim, long
Ere his last hour. And when the reveller,
Mad in the chase of pleasure, stretches on,
And strains each nerve, and clears the path of life
Like wind, thou point'st him to the dreadful goal,
And shak'st thy hour-glass in his reeling eye,
And check'st him in mid course. Thy skeleton hand
Shows to the faint of spirit the right path,
And he is warned, and fears to step aside.
Thou sett'st between the ruffian and his crime
Thy ghastly countenance, and his slack hand
Drops the drawn knife. But, oh, most fearfully
Dost thou show forth Heaven's justice, when thy shafts
Drink up the ebbing spirit--then the hard
Of heart and violent of hand restores
The treasure to the friendless wretch he wronged.
Then from the writhing ***** thou dost pluck
The guilty secret; lips, for ages sealed,
Are faithless to the dreadful trust at length,
And give it up; the felon's latest breath
Absolves the innocent man who bears his crime;
The slanderer, horror smitten, and in tears,
Recalls the deadly obloquy he forged
To work his brother's ruin. Thou dost make
Thy penitent victim utter to the air
The dark conspiracy that strikes at life,

And aims to whelm the laws; ere yet the hour
Is come, and the dread sign of ****** given.
Thus, from the first of time, hast thou been found
On virtue's side; the wicked, but for thee,
Had been too strong for the good; the great of earth
Had crushed the weak for ever. Schooled in guile
For ages, while each passing year had brought
Its baneful lesson, they had filled the world
With their abominations; while its tribes,
Trodden to earth, imbruted, and despoiled,
Had knelt to them in worship; sacrifice
Had smoked on many an altar, temple roofs
Had echoed with the blasphemous prayer and hymn:
But thou, the great reformer of the world,
Tak'st off the sons of violence and fraud
In their green pupilage, their lore half learned--
Ere guilt has quite o'errun the simple heart
God gave them at their birth, and blotted out
His image. Thou dost mark them, flushed with hope,
As on the threshold of their vast designs
Doubtful and loose they stand, and strik'st them down.

Alas, I little thought that the stern power
Whose fearful praise I sung, would try me thus
Before the strain was ended. It must cease--
For he is in his grave who taught my youth
The art of verse, and in the bud of life
Offered me to the muses. Oh, cut off
Untimely! when thy reason in its strength,
Ripened by years of toil and studious search

And watch of Nature's silent lessons, taught
Thy hand to practise best the lenient art
To which thou gavest thy laborious days.
And, last, thy life. And, therefore, when the earth
Received thee, tears were in unyielding eyes
And on hard cheeks, and they who deemed thy skill
Delayed their death-hour, shuddered and turned pale
When thou wert gone. This faltering verse, which thou
Shalt not, as wont, o'erlook, is all I have
To offer at thy grave--this--and the hope
To copy thy example, and to leave
A name of which the wretched shall not think
As of an enemy's, whom they forgive
As all forgive the dead. Rest, therefore, thou
Whose early guidance trained my infant steps--
Rest, in the ***** of God, till the brief sleep
Of death is over, and a happier life
Shall dawn to waken thine insensible dust.
Now thou art not--and yet the men whose guilt
Has wearied Heaven for vengeance--he who bears
False witness--he who takes the orphan's bread,
And robs the widow--he who spreads abroad
Polluted hands in mockery of prayer,
Are left to cumber earth. Shuddering I look
On what is written, yet I blot not out
The desultory numbers--let them stand.
The record of an idle revery.

Conservative these days now means
The richest are the few who glean
The wealth that exists in our land.
The rest of it is sleight of hand.
After decades of this foolishness
We have grown weary of your mess.
We don’t think we can ever win
This country back to from you again.

You seem to hate those who are non-rich
And include them in every austerity pitch.
You refuse to help them feed their brood
Then pay the farmers not to grow food.
You cover yourself with glowing self-praise;
People starve, you grant yourself a raise.
You stand before the rich and genuflect
And subject your constituents to neglect.

You want every child to be born
Then vote to have their allotment shorn.
You seem to want them not to thrive;
You only protect them until they are alive.
You send the soldiers to march and die
And deny them benefits. Tell us why.
Is it because you have your wealth
And no longer care about their health?

The most hateful game you always play
Is making the voters look another way.
While you make laws that take their rights
You engage them in unimportant fights
About who is sleeping with whom today
And who is straight and who else is gay.
Or you worry the people about war
While you funnel subsidies by the score.

You pay your friends and give them jobs
Then call your opponents egregious slobs.
You engage in double-talk about the facts
And claim calumnies are helpful acts.
You accept your fortunes from commerce
And agree to treat the populace worse.
No matter how often you rearrange things
You edits end up being very strange things.

We need to hear our own clarion call
And push this kind of politics to the wall.
We must do more than hope for liberty
And once again fight for the land of the free.
We can’t just sit around at home and mope.
As it is, today, we can only sadly hope
That some liberty you will choose to take
Will cause the regular people to awake.

You’re a smack down
Kick-around, clueless clown
That tells unfunny jokes
And runs with the blokes
That put up with your antics
And your busted semantics
Because they think someday
Things might swing your way
And they can profit by association
With a human abomination
That enjoys investing atrocities
With scarifying velocity
On the halt and the lame;
Running opportunistic games
On those who cannot defend;
World without end, amen.

But heaven forfend
That you might have a friend
Who seems a holy prophet
But does not seek for profit
And acolytes to their cause;
A bogus Santa Claus
Who leeches from the people
In his church without a steeple,
Just microwave towers
Sprouting like ugly flowers
To spread out the message
So we can read every passage
That boil down to a sermon
To send money to this vermin
Your bund proclaims a messiah
When he is really a pariah
Nobody has yet recognized
He’s so well disguised.

But, be aware, polecat
Some know what your at
And what you are doing
I nothing more than accruing
That which you can bank.
You have nobody to thank
For the outcome you inherit
From the outcome you assume
When your calumnies bloom
Into the realities that appear
When the truth draws near
And tars and feathers you
And when your victims do
What they should have done along
Was reject your ways gone wrong
And found a rail lying around
To ride your **** out of town.

lantern raised
she yields not
to the untamed hand,
the empty heart,
the preening, the predatory,
that find the pure,
the passionate,
and the tempest that swirls about them,
to mark and groom,
their trust wrought for a singular end,
prevarications
to render truth writhing upon the
calumnies of acolytes,
the hardscrabble earth
where the courage and decency
of the many break and recede  
until wretchedly,
shamelessly,
forsaken

What did I know, before Truth, trundling, came
To preach upon my stoop, with sweetest care
To bring my mind and ears to be ever tamed
Enough to acknowledge truth so fierce and rare
The truth consists in Love, in Hearts, in Life
Whereas lies are a callous, cold industry of war
That surely as all spouses love their wives
Do conjure empty calumnies evermore
Until a prophet and a preacher pure
As Devil by stealth creeps upon them with knives
Yet sends back to hell that eternal bore
As Love and Life and Peace do thrive

The boy irresistible to adore,
Makes me crave for more amor

What do we know of Truth, of Justice, Love?
Whilst calumnies of Ignorance prevail,
Deceive the mind of man, of woman, have,
We knowledge of the real to yield, avail?
All the pleasures of the Truth be shunned,
In favour of the seductions of Wealth,
Of Power, of Vainglory, agendas planned,
To rob the world of Beauty, Truth by stealth.