| |
“This my song is made for Kerensky.”
O MARKET square, O slattern place, | |
| Is glory in your slack disgrace? | |
| Plump quack doctors sell their pills, | |
| Gentle grafters sell brass watches, | |
| Silly anarchists yell their ills. | 5 |
| Shall we be as weird as these— | |
| In the breezes nod and wheeze? | |
| |
| Heaven’s mass is sung, | |
| Tomorrow’s mass is sung | |
| In a spirit tongue | 10 |
| By wind and dust and birds: | |
| The high mass of liberty, | |
| While wave the banners red, | |
| Sung round the soap-box— | |
| A mass for soldiers dead. | 15 |
| |
| When you leave your faction in the once-loved hall, | |
| Like a true American tongue-lash them all; | |
| Stand then on the corner under starry skies, | |
| And get you a gang of the worn and the wise. | |
| The soldiers of the Lord may be squeaky when they rally, | 20 |
| The soldiers of the Lord are a queer little army; | |
| But the soldiers of the Lord, before the year is through, | |
| Will gather the whole nation, recruit all creation, | |
| To smite the hosts abhorred and all the heavens renew; | |
| Enforcing with the bayonet the thing the ages teach— | 25 |
| Free speech! | |
| Free speech! | |
| |
| Down with the Prussians, and all their works! | |
| Down with the Turks! | |
| Down with every army that fights against the soap-box— | 30 |
| The Pericles, Socrates, Diogenes soap-box, | |
| The old-Elijah, Jeremiah, John-the-Baptist soap-box, | |
| The Rousseau, Mirabeau, Danton soap-box, | |
| The Karl-Marx, Henry-George, Woodrow-Wilson soap-box. | |
| We will make the wide earth safe for the soap-box, | 35 |
| The everlasting foe of beastliness and tyranny, | |
| Platform of liberty—Magna Charta liberty, | |
| Andrew Jackson liberty, bleeding-Kansas liberty, | |
| New-born Russian liberty: | |
| Battleship of thought, the round world over, | 40 |
| Loved by the red-hearted, | |
| Loved by the broken-hearted, | |
| Fair young amazon or proud tough rover; | |
| Loved by the lion, | |
| Loved by the lion, | 45 |
| Loved by the lion!— | |
| Feared by the fox. | |
| |
| Death at the bedstead of every Kaiser knocks. | |
| The Hohenzollern army shall be felled like the ox. | |
| The fatal hour is striking in all the doomsday clocks; | 50 |
| The while, by freedom’s alchemy, | |
| Beauty is born. | |
| Ring every sleigh-bell, ring every church bell, | |
| Blow the clear trumpet and listen for the answer— | |
| The blast from the sky of the Gabriel horn. | 55 |
| Hail the Russian picture around the little box: | |
| Exiles, | |
| Troops in files, | |
| Generals in uniform, | |
| Mujiks in their smocks, | 60 |
| And holy maiden soldiers who have cut away their locks. | |
| |
| All the people of the world, little folk and great, | |
| Are tramping through the Russian Soul as through a city gate, | |
| As though it were a street of stars that paves the shadowy deep; | |
| And mighty Tolstoi leads the van along the stairway steep. | 65 |
| |
| But now the people shout: | |
| “Hail to Kerensky—he hurled the tyrants out!” | |
| And this my song is made for Kerensky, | |
| Prophet of the world-wide intolerable hope— | |
| There on the soap-box, seasoned, dauntless, | 70 |
| There amid the Russian celestial kaleidoscope, | |
| Flags of liberty, rags and battlesmoke. | |
| |
| Moscow!—Chicago! | |
| Come let us praise battling Kerensky! | |
| Bravo! bravo!— | 75 |
| Comrade Kerensky, thunderstorm and rainbow, | |
| Comrade Kerensky, bravo, bravo! | |
| |
