The Chinese Nightingale | Page 9

prattle.
All the millions of earth have voted for fight.

You are voting for talk, with hands lily white."
He leaped to the floor,
then grew seven feet high,
Beautiful, terrible, scorn in his eye:
The
Devil Eternal, Apollo grown old,
With beard of bright silver and
garments of gold.
"What will you do to end war for good?
Will you
stand by the book-case, be nailed to the wood?"
I stretched out my
arms. He drove the nails deep,
Silently, coolly. The house was asleep,

I hung for three years, forbidden to die.
I seemed but a shadow the
servants passed by.
At the end of the time with hot irons he returned.

"The Quitter Sublime" on my bosom he burned.
As he seared me
he hissed: "You are wearing away.
The good angels tell me you leave
them today.
You want to come down from the nails in the door.
The
victor must hang there three hundred years more.
If any prig-saint
would outvote all mankind
He must use an immortally resolute mind.

Think what the saints of Benares endure,
Through infinite
birthpangs their courage is sure.
Self-tortured, self-ruled, they build
their powers high,
Until they are gods, overmaster the sky."
Then
he pulled out the nails. He shouted "Come in."
To heal me there
stepped in a lady of sin.
Her hand was in mine. We walked in the sun.

She said: "Now forget them, the Saxon and Hun.
You are dreary
and aged and silly and weak.
Let us smell the sweet groves. Let the
summertime speak."

We walked to the river. We swam there in state.

I was a serpent. She was my mate.
I forgot in the marsh, as I
tumbled about,
That trial in my room, where I did not hold out.

Since I was a serpent, my mate seemed to me
As a mermaiden seems
to a fisher at sea,
Or a whisky soaked girl to a whisky soaked king.


I woke. She had turned to a ravening thing
On the table -- a buzzard
with leperous head.
She tore up my rhymes and my drawings. She
said:
"I am your own cheap bankrupt soul.
Will you die for the
nations, making them whole?
We joy in the swamp and here we are
gay.
WILL YOU BRING YOUR FINE PEACE TO THE
NATIONS TODAY?"
"This, My Song, Is Made for Kerensky"
(Being a Chant of the American Soap-Box and the Russian
Revolution.)
O market square, O slattern place,
Is glory in your slack disgrace?

Plump quack doctors sell their pills,
Gentle grafters sell brass watches,

Silly anarchists yell their ills.
Shall we be as weird as these?
In
the breezes nod and wheeze?
Heaven's mass is sung,
Tomorrow's mass is sung
In a spirit tongue

By wind and dust and birds,
The high mass of liberty,
While
wave the banners red:
Sung round the soap-box,
A mass for soldiers
dead.
When you leave your faction in the once-loved hall,
Like a true
American tongue-lash them all,
Stand then on the corner under starry
skies
And get you a gang of the worn and the wise.
The soldiers of
the Lord may be squeaky when they rally,
The soldiers of the Lord
are a queer little army,
But the soldiers of the Lord, before the year is
through,
Will gather the whole nation, recruit all creation,
To smite
the hosts abhorred, and all the heavens renew --
Enforcing with the
bayonet the thing the ages teach --
Free speech!
Free speech!
Down with the Prussians, and all their works.
Down with the Turks.

Down with every army that fights against the soap-box,
The
Pericles, Socrates, Diogenes soap-box,
The old Elijah, Jeremiah,
John-the-Baptist soap-box,
The Rousseau, Mirabeau, Danton

soap-box,
The Karl Marx, Henry George, Woodrow Wilson soap-box.

We will make the wide earth safe for the soap-box,
The everlasting
foe of beastliness and tyranny,
Platform of liberty: -- Magna Charta
liberty,
Andrew Jackson liberty, bleeding Kansas liberty,
New-born
Russian liberty: --
Battleship of thought,
The round world over,

Loved by the red-hearted,
Loved by the broken-hearted,
Fair young
Amazon or proud tough rover,
Loved by the lion,
Loved by the lion,

Loved by the lion,
Feared by the fox.
The Russian Revolution is the world revolution.
Death at the
bedstead of every Kaiser knocks.
The Hohenzollern army shall be
felled like the ox.
The fatal hour is striking in all the doomsday
clocks.
The while, by freedom's alchemy
Beauty is born.
Ring
every sleigh-bell, ring every church bell,
Blow the clear trumpet, and
listen for the answer: --
The blast from the sky of the Gabriel horn.
Hail the Russian picture around the little box: --
Exiles,
Troops in
files,
Generals in uniform,
Mujiks in their smocks,
And holy
maiden soldiers who have cut away their locks.
All the peoples and
the nations in processions mad and great, Are rolling through the
Russian Soul as through a city gate: -- As though it were a street of
stars that paves the shadowy deep. And mighty Tolstoi leads the van
along the stairway steep.
But now the people shout:
"Hail to Kerensky,
He hurled the tyrants
out."
And this my song is made for Kerensky,
Prophet of the
world-wide intolerable hope,
There on the soap-box, seasoned,
dauntless,
There amid the Russian celestial kaleidoscope,
Flags of
liberty, rags and battlesmoke.
Moscow and Chicago!
Come let us praise battling Kerensky,
Bravo!
Bravo!

Comrade Kerensky the thunderstorm and rainbow!
Comrade
Kerensky, Bravo,