Page:Prometheus Bound, and other poems.djvu/81

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And lift my black face, my black hand,

Here, in your names, to curse this land

Ye blessed in freedom's evermore.

I am black, I am black;

And yet God made me, they say.

But if He did so, smiling back

He must have cast his work away

Under the feet of his white creatures,

With a look of scorn,—that the dusky features

Might be trodden again to clay.

And yet He has made dark things

To be glad and merry as light.

There's a little dark bird, sits and sings;

There's a dark stream ripples out of sight;

And the dark frogs chant in the safe morass,

And the sweetest stars are made to pass

O'er the face of the darkest night.

But we who are dark, we are dark!

Ah God, we have no stars!

About our souls in care and cark

Our blackness shuts like prison-bars:

The poor souls crouch so far behind,

That never a comfort can they find

By reaching through the prison-bars.