Voltairine De Cleyre

“ When the blood of the murdered spatters the stones!
"Hark ye! Out of the reeking slums,
Thick with the fetid stench of crime,
Boiling up through their sickening scums,
Bubbles that burst through the crimson wine,
"Voices burst --with terrible sound,
Crying the truth your dull souls ne'er saw!
We are your sentence! The wheel turns round!
The bastard spawn of your bastard law!"
This is bastard: That Man should say
How Love shall love, and how Life shall live! ”

“ For it could not be white while the drawers' and hewers',
My brothers, were calloused and darkened and slimed.
Yet touch it! It is no criminal's hand!
No children are toiling to keep it fair!
It is free from the curse of the stolen land,
It is clean of the theft of the sea and air!
It has set no seals to a murderous law,
To sign a bitter, black league with death!
No covenants false do these fingers draw
In the name of "The State" to barter Faith!
It bears no stain of the yellow gold
That Earth's wrethches give as the cost of heaven! ”

“ When you sneer in my ears, "Thou bastard born?"
Am I not as the rest of you,
With a hope to reach, and a dream to live?
With a soul to suffer, a heart to know
The pangs that the thrusts of the heartless give?" ”