Bastard Born
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 wrethches 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!
[...] Read more
poem by Voltairine de Cleyre (1891)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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