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"You are but
children."
- EGYPTIAN PRIEST TO SOLON
Red of the
Dawn!
Screams of a babe in the red-hot palms of a
Moloch of Tyre,
Man with his brotherless dinner on
man in the tropical wood,
Priests in the name of the
Lord passing souls through fire to the fire,
Head-hunters and boats of Dahomey that float upon human
blood!
Red of the Dawn!
Godless fury of peoples,
and Christless frolic of kings,
And the bolt of war
dashing down upon cities and blazing farms,
For
Babylon was a child newborn, and Rome was a babe in
arms,
And London and Paris and all the rest are as
yet but in leading strings.
Dawn not Day,
While
scandal is mouthing a bloodless name at her cannibal
feast,
And rake-ruined bodies and souls go down in a
common wreck,
And the Press of a thousand cities is
prized for it smells of the beast,
Or easily violates
virgin Truth for a coin or a check.
Dawn not Day!
Is it Shame, so few should have climbed from the dens in
the level below,
Men, with a heart and a soul, no
slaves of a four-footed will?
But if twenty million
of summers are stored in the sunlight still,
We are
far from the noon of man, there is time for the race to
grow.
Red of the Dawn!
Is it turning a fainter
red? So be it, but when shall we lay
The Ghost of the
Brute that is walking and haunting us yet, and be free?
In a hundred, a thousand winters? Ah, what will our
children be?
The men of a hundred thousand, a million
summers away?
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