Page:Songs of Rebellion (Hall 1915).djvu/18

 US, THE HOBOES

We shall laugh to scorn your power that now holds the world in awe, We shall trample on your customs and shall spit upon your law; We shall come up from life's desert to your burdened banquet hall, We shall turn your wine to wormwood, your honey into gall.

We shall go where wail the children, where, from your race-killing mills, Flows a bloody stream of profit to your cursed, insatiate tills; We shall tear from your drivers, in our shamed and angered pride, With the fury and the fierceness of a fatherhood denied.

We shall set our sisters on you, those you trapt into your hells Where the mother instinct's stifled and no earthly beauty dwells; We shall call them from the living-death, the death in life you gave, To sing our class' triumph o'er your cruel system's grave.

We shall strip them of their epaulets, the panderers who fight Your wars against the workers for a bone on which to bite; We shall batter down your prisons, we shall see your chain-gangs free, We shall drive you from the mountainside, the valley, plain and sea.

We shall hunt around the fences where your ox-men sweat and gape Till they stampede down your stockades in their panic to escape; We shall steal up thru the darkness, we shall prowl the wood and town, Till they waken to their power and arise and ride you down.

We shall send the message to them, on a whisper down the night, We shall cheer as warrior women drive the ox-men to the fight; We shall use your guile against you, all the cunning you have taught, All the wisdom of the serpent to attain the ending sought.

We shall come as comes the cyclone,—in the stillness we shall form— From the calm your terror fashioned we shall hurl on you the storm; We shall strike when least expected, when you deem toil's rout complete, And crush you and your hessians 'neath our brogan-shodded feet.

We shall laugh to scorn your power that now holds the world in awe, We shall trample on your customs, we shall spit upon your law, We shall outrage all your temples, we shall blaspheme all your gods,— We shall turn the old world over as the plowman turns the clods! —12—