In the dark, with a child on her bosom,
A woman is walking the floor;
And she moans while she hushes her darling,
“O God! it is hard to be poor!”
In the dark, with a child on her bosom―
The dark of a comfortless room;
Not even a candle’s dull ray to soothe
The terrible ache of the gloom.
Down the street throngs a joyous procession,
With thousands of lamps all alight,
And the red glare of whispering rockets
Ascending the silence of night.
Oil enough for the multitudes marching,
And banners and ribbons and flowers,
While the blue of the zenith is blazing
With grand pyrotechnical showers.
All alone with her poor little burden,
A woman with hungering eyes
Soothes, with lips that are pallid with fasting,
Her famishing baby’s cries.
She catches the echoes of loud huzzas―
“Great God!” she sighs, under her breath,
“While Opulence squanders so much away,
Must my little ones starve to death?”
Hark, the tramp of the marchers comes nearer!
Transparencies gleam past her door;
There “Our Cause,” “Our Kind,” “Our Country, she reads,
But never one mottoed “Our Poor!”
And she looks at the flickering torches,
And counts the magnificent flags;
Then turns with a gasp to her darkness again,
And her scanty, unseemly rags.
Like a river of light, the procession
Flows away down the stony street,
And the star-studded gates of the midnight
Close on the reverberant feet.
The music dies out in the distance,
All silently sink to their rest,
Save a maniac mother pacing the floor,
A little cold corpse on her breast.
From: Townsend, Mary Ashley, Xariffa’s Poems, 1870, J B Lippincott & Co: Philadelphia, pp. 19-20.
(http://archive.org/stream/xariffaspoems00towngoog#page/n26/mode/2up)
Date: 1870
By: Mary Ashley Townsend (1832-1901)
From Troubles of The World 