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"You
are but children."
- EGYPTIAN PRIEST TO SOLON
Red of the
Dawn!
Screams of a babe in the red-hot palms of a Moloch of Tyre,
Man with his brotherless dinner on man in the tropical
wood,
Priests in the name of the Lord passing souls through fire
to the fire,
Head-hunters and boats of Dahomey that float upon human
blood!
Red of the
Dawn!
Godless fury of peoples, and Christless frolic of kings,
And the bolt of war dashing down upon cities and blazing
farms,
For Babylon was a child newborn, and Rome was a babe in
arms,
And London and Paris and all the rest are as yet but in
leading strings.
Dawn not
Day,
While scandal is mouthing a bloodless name at her cannibal
feast,
And rake-ruined bodies and souls go down in a common
wreck,
And the Press of a thousand cities is prized for it smells
of the beast,
Or easily violates virgin Truth for a coin or a check.
Dawn not
Day!
Is it Shame, so few should have climbed from the dens in
the level below,
Men, with a heart and a soul, no slaves of a four-footed
will?
But if twenty million of summers are stored in the
sunlight still,
We are far from the noon of man, there is time for the
race to grow.
Red of the
Dawn!
Is it turning a fainter red? So be it, but when shall we
lay
The Ghost of the Brute that is walking and haunting us
yet, and be free?
In a hundred, a thousand winters? Ah, what will our
children be?
The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?
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