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Title: America's Glory No Fugitive
Author: Edward Doyle [
More Titles by Doyle]
I
How weird a whisper! 'tis from Wallabout.
'Tis glory hoarse with calling: "Raise those hulks
Where writhe my faithful." See! the tory skulks
Behind the sun who, stooping to fill out
Their throats with his god-breath, to swell the shout
Of a free people, finds the brave in bulks,
Strewn and held fast where Darkness, beaten, sulks
That thrall has been forever put to rout.
Those mangled thousands are not dead; they live,
Refashioned men by freedom. Is the tory
Behind the sun, to mock me, who am Glory,
Being the lifted life those martyrs give?
He creeps beneath the sun and, ghastly gory,
Crys out: "Thou yet shall be the fugitive".
II
Oh, weirder grows the whisper into word,
As sharp as lightening, and as broad of reach,
As seas, flung down by God to every beach
Where thirsts a sparrow, or a bleating herd!
There is no soul through out the land, not stirred;
For, oh, to glory God gives his own speech
When darkness, raised by Gold, declares that each,
Hulk-held, is good but for the wolf and bird.
Is Gold grown conscious, now the Country's King
That, at his beck, the blood for Freedom spilt
Shall be accursed, and I, then, for the guilt
Of dropping not with thud, as he with ring
At Darkness' feet, be shut in mud and silt
Forever and with stars, cease, beaconing?
III
Oh, as the earth in discord and in dark,
When struck by Love on high with will for mace,
Keeps rattling till each mote finds its true place,
And mountain, fledged with groves, vies with the lark
To reach the sunrise; so the madness stark
Of gold, dethroning blood as God's best grace,
When struck by Glory's voice drops Nadir-base,
And blood for Freedom spilt, forms heaven's blue arc.
The shouts of millions shake Oblivion's mire
And raise Thrall's Hulks. Look! Justice's stooping sun,
Seeing in agony's each, a Washington,
Breaths life in them, and, over Brooklyn's spire
And New York's Babel Tower, they, one by one,
Hold Liberty's broading Torch of quenchless fire.
[The end]
Edward Doyle's poem: America's Glory No Fugitive
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