Who from many a cloudy station
List’ the whirring of the wheels
Bounding on without cessation,
Dragging progress at their heels;
Who, as children from the town,
Throng the parapets, and strain
Form and voice in flashing down
Warning signals to the train
Speeding on, at man’s behest,
In the calm, or tempest’s teeth,
With the lightning in its breast,
And the thunder underneath!
(A Ballad of Armenia.)
They had fought, they had failed, those women and now, in a wild-eyed throng,
They fled from the red destroyer, and they cried: “O Lord, how long?—
How long, O Lord, till the ending of the ghastly sounds and sights,
Till the dripping days be finished, and the thrice red-running nights,—
Till the last cold corpse falls, severed from the last Armenian head,
Till the last maid be dishonoured, and the last hot tear be shed?”
They had fled from the red destroyer, but he hastens around their track,
Till the fate they had flown is before them, and they turn in their pathway back.
But, Northward and Southward and Eastward and Westward, and round and round,
Come the gleam of the steely lightning, and the wild, soul-harrowing sound,
As mother and sister and daughter, and the child at its mother’s breast
Go down in the surge of slaughter and the wreck of the great Opprest.
And now they are huddled together, as the death-cries rise and swell,
Where the rock runs up to Heaven, and the gulf goes down to Hell,—
On the edge of a beetling hillock; when, lo! from the ’wildered crowd,
On a peak of the rock steps Schakhe, and calls to her sisters, loud:—
“O sisters in nameless sorrow, baptised in a life of tears;
Before you two paths lie open: behind you a thousand years
Fade far in the dusky distance, one long, broad stream of blood,
That flows by the wreck and ruin of sword and fire and flood!
Before you two paths lie open: one leads where dangers lurk,
And the pain and the dumb dishonour from the merciless hand of the Turk.
Choose ye! Will ye thread that pathway, prove false to the men ye love;
Prove false to the children ye bore them; prove false to the God above?
Will ye sell yourselves to the spoilers of father and mother and child,
Who butchered and then, like devils, at their cries for mercy smiled?
Do ye think of the thousands rotting, flung down in a ghastly heap
Unblessed; whose dust commingles in their last unhallowed sleep?
Do ye think of the blood, the sorrow, the wild, sky-rending cries,
As the scarce-born babe was mangled to feast their fiendish eyes?
Do you think of the brute defilement when, full in the flare of day,
Ye were robbed of your dear-prized honour, and made the Moslem’s prey?
Will ye choose that path, O sisters? ’Tis a path ye have often trod;
Or throw yourselves on the mercy of the great, all-powerful God?