C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Starving Armenia
By William Watson (1858–1935)
From ‘The Purple East’
O
Ye housed and whole who listen to the cry
Of them that not yet slain and mangled lie,
Only despoiled of all that made life sweet,—
Only left bare to snow and wind and sleet,
And roofless to the inhospitable sky:
Give them of your abundance, lest they die,
And famine make this mighty woe complete;
And lest if truly, as your creed aver,
A day of reckoning come, it be your lot
To hear the voice of the uprisen dead:
“We were the naked whom ye covered not,
The sick to whom ye did not minister,
And the anhungered whom ye gave not bread.”