Children of mothers’ flesh this cannot last
Forever. I am old and soon I die,
And nothing can torment me very long,
Wherefore I speak what youth might fear to say
To you, as to my sons of long ago,
Who died, as all your friends have died, in war.
A MAN
Speak, for we listen.
THE OLD MOTHER,
That is very well,
For this is murder that ye did commit,
For glamour and for vanity and lust,
For selfishness in trade, and for all freedom
To breed your own kind over all the earth,
Each for himself and his own kind alone,
Forgetting that ye all have suckled mothers,
Forgetting that ye owe us fealty,
And that ye owe it to yourselves to be
Staunch farmers of the World Field, and good friends,
One flesh, one love, one state, one family.
A MAN
Even that we might be able to achieve
If one would help us to the holy way.
We fight not for ourselves, good mother, no!
We fight for place, for honor and for home,
For what the great, who lead us, say is best,
The whims of senators, the dreams of kings;
And often know not why our blood is poured,
A turbulent, unholy river of lust.
And when the people cry for war and shout
The sure destruction of another nation
It is because they fear and know that fear
Is far more terrible than roughest strife.
Nor are we fools to give up life with joy,
Save when the feud of Capital and Labor
Has made our minds a Hell of sordid warfare
And clothed our gayety in querulous crepe.
Then, in our desperate mourning for young joy,
The sweetness and variety of life,
The rainbow radiance and the cloth of gold
That are youth’s great inalienable right,
We know no other way and follow blindly
The one mad way that gives a thrill of glory,
And frees our pulsing life. So are we made....
But we, who lie on beds of bloody sweat,
Washed by our women’s tears, we fain would see
Another era of mankind made new,
Young Titans, strong enough to war on war,
This hoary curse from the stringy throat of Mars
To answer and to silence and to choke!
OTHER MEN
Mother, the way—the upward way from Hell!
THE OLD MOTHER,