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O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, Is this the handiwork you give to God, This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quencht? How will you ever straighten up this shape; Touch it again with immortality; Give back the upward looking and the light; Rebuild in it the music and the dreams; Make right the immemorial infamies, Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes? O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, How will the future reckon with this Man? How answer his brute question in that hour When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings-- With those who shaped him to the thing he is-- When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world, After the silence of the centuries? -Edwin Markham (1852-1940), The Man with the Hoe (1899) |