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A Last Appeal
- KNOWING our needs, hardly knowing our powers,
- Hear how we cry to you, brothers of ours!—
- Brothers in nature, pulse, passions, and pains,
- Our sins in you, and your blood in our veins.
- First in your palace, or last in our den,
- Basest or best, we are all of us men!
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- Justice eternal cries out in our name,
- What is the least common manhood can claim?
- ‘Food that we make for you,
- Money we earn:
- Give us our share of them—
- Give us our turn.’
- You with the land and the money, we make
- Out of our lives the new wealth that you take.
- Have we earned only such pitiful dole
- As just holds worn body to desolate soul?
- When that soul is bewildered each day and perplext
- With the problem of how to get bread for the next,
- Is it better to end it, as some of us do,
- Or to fight it out bravely, still calling to you—
- ‘Food that we make for you,
- Money we earn:
- Give us our share of them—
- Give us our turn.’?
- Ever more passionate grows our demand—
- Give us our share of our food and our land:
- Give us our rights, make us equal and free—
- Let us be all we are not, but might be.
- Our sons would be honest, our daughters be pure,
- If our wage were more certain, your vices less sure—
- Oh, you who are forging the fetters we feel,
- Hear our wild protest, our maddened appeal—
- ‘Food that we make for you,
- Money we earn:
- Give us our share of them—
- Give us our turn.’
- Hear us, and answer, while Time is your friend,
- Lest we be answered by God in the end;
- Lest, when the flame of His patience burns low,
- We be the weapon He shapes for His blow—
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- Lest with His foot on your necks He shall stand,
- And appeal that you spurned be new‐born as command,
- And thunder your doom, as you die by the rod
- Of the vengeance of man through the justice of God.
- ‘Food that we make for you,
- Money we earn:
- Give us our share of them—
- Give us our turn.’
1884.
