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Title: The Gold-Seekers
Author: John Kendrick Bangs [
More Titles by Bangs]
GOLD, gold, gold!
What care we for hunger and cold?
What care we for the moil and strife,
Or the thousands of foes to health and life,
When there’s gold for the mighty, and gold for the meek,
And gold for whoever shall dare to seek?
Untold
Is the gold;
And it lies in the reach of the man that’s bold:
In the hands of the man who dares to face
The death in the blast, that blows apace;
That withers the leaves on the forest tree;
That fetters with ice all the northern sea;
That chills all the green on the fair earth’s breast,
And as certainly kills as the un-stayed pest.
It lies in the hands of the man who’d sell
His hold on his life for an ice-bound hell.
What care we for the fevered brain
That’s filled with ravings and thoughts insane,
So long as we hold
In our hands the gold?-
The glistening, glittering, ghastly gold
That comes at the end of the hunger and cold;
That comes at the end of the awful thirst;
That comes through the pain and torture accurst
Of limbs that are racked and minds o’erthrown,
The gold lies there and is all our own,
Be we mighty or meek,
If we do but seek.
For the hunger is sweet and the cold is fair
To the man whose riches are past compare;
And the o’erthrown mind is as good as sane,
And a joy to the limbs is the racking pain,
If the gold is there.
And they say, if you fail, in your dying day
All the tears, all the troubles, are wiped away
By the fever-thought of your shattered mind
That a cruel world has at last grown kind;
That your hands o’errun with the clinking gold,
With nuggets of weight and of worth untold,
And your vacant eyes
Gloat o’er the riches of Paradise!
[The end]
John Kendrick Bangs's poem: Gold-Seekers
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