Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/600

 Unhappy, can I give you back your honor? Tho' I forgave, would any man forget? While all our great green earth has, trampled on her, The treason and terror of the night we met.

Not any more in vengeance or in pardon, One old wife bargains for a bean that's hers, You have no word to break; no heart to harden. Ride on and prosper. You have lost your spurs.

Buttons

(Contemporary American poet)

I have been watching the war map slammed up for advertising in front of the newspaper office. Buttons—red and yellow buttons—blue and black buttons—are shoved back and forth across the map.

A laughing young man, sunny with freckles, Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd, And then fixes a yellow button one inch west And follows the yellow button with a black button one inch west.

(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak along a river edge, Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in their throats.) Who by Christ would guess what it cost to move two buttons one inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing to us?