“I, the Almighty God,

I have made all this,

I have made it for kaisers, czars, and kings.”

Three times ten million men say: No.

Three times ten million men say:

God is a God of the People.

And the God who made the world

And fixed the morning sun,

And flung the evening stars,

And shaped the baby hands of life,

This is the God of the Four Brothers;

This is the God of bleeding France and bleeding Russia;

This is the God of the people of Britain and America.

The graves from the Irish Sea to the Caucasus peaks are ten times a million.

The stubs and stumps of arms and legs, the eyesockets empty, the cripples, ten times a million.

The crimson thumb-print of this anathema is on the door panels of a hundred million homes.

Cows gone, mothers on sick-beds, children cry a hunger and no milk comes in the noon-time or at night.

The death-yells of it all, the torn throats of men in ditches calling for water, the shadows and the hacking lungs in dugouts, the steel paws that clutch and squeeze a scarlet drain day by day—the storm of it is hell.

But look! child! the storm is blowing for a clean air.

Look! the four brothers march

And hurl their big shoulders

And swear the job shall be done.

Out of the wild finger-writing north and south, east and west, over the blood-crossed, blood-dusty ball of earth,

Out of it all a God who knows is sweeping clean,

Out of it all a God who sees and pierces through, is breaking and cleaning out an old thousand years, is making ready for a new thousand years.

The four brothers shall be five and more.

Under the chimneys of the winter-time the children of the world shall sing new songs.

Among the rocking restless cradles the mothers of the world shall sing new sleepy-time songs.

Nearer Than Any Mother’s Heart Wishes

1

In the month of February Eighteen Sixty One

there was a saint in Charleston, South Carolina

and everybody loved him for what he had of

humor, patience, understanding, compassion:

he was soft and hard and nobody’s fool,

standing over six feet, heavy jowls, big mouth,

swarthy skin, oily black hair straight

down the slope of his broad back.

And he sees war coming North and South.

He meets a man one morning asking him which way

to the Lunatic Asylum—and James Louis Petigru

answers by pointing north, south, east, and west:

“Go any way at all—you can’t go wrong—

The whole country has gone crazy!”

2

After Ghengis Khan had burned a thousand barns,

wrecked a hundred towns, and killed and killed

more people than he had time to count

he heard an old peasant woman say one day:

“Now this here Ghengis Khan where did he come

from? I never heard of him.”

And it changed his ideas about name and fame.

3

After Napoleon had crossed one country

and let them know who he was