Upton Sinclair, ed. (1878–1968).
The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest. 1915. | | | Mill Children
(From “Processionals”) |
By John Curtis Underwood |
(American poet, born 1874) |
| | | WE have forgotten how to sing: our laughter is a godless thing: listless and loud and shrill and sly. | |
| We have forgotten how to smile. Our lips, our voices too are vile. We are all dead before we die. | |
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| Our mothers’ mothers made us so: the father that we never know in blindness and in wantonness | |
| Caused us to come to question you. What is it that you others do, that profit so by our distress? | |
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| You and your children softly sleep. We and our mothers vigil keep. You cheated us of all delight, | 5 |
| Ere our sick spirits came to birth: you made our fair and fruitful earth a nest of pestilence and blight. | |
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| Your black machines are never still, and hard, relentless as your will, they card us like the cotton waste. | |
| And flesh and blood more cheap than they, they seize and eat and shred away, to feed the fever of your haste. | |
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| For we are waste and shoddy here, who know no God, no faith but fear, no happiness, no hope but sleep. | |
| Half imbecile and half obscene we sit and tend each tense machine, too sick to sigh, too tired to weep, | 10 |
| Until the tortured end of day, when fevered faces turn away, to see the stars from blackness leap. | | | | |
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