Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre. Voltairine De Cleyre
But I—I need blue air and opened bloom;
To keep my music means that it must die;
And when the thrill, the joy, the love of life is gone,
I, too, am dead—a corpse, though not entombed.
Let me live then—but a while—the gloom soon comes,
The flower closes and the petals shut;
Through them the perfume slips out, like a soul—
The long, still sleep of death—and then the Grave.
Cleveland, Ohio, March, 1889.
BETRAYED
So, you're the chaplain! You needn't say what you have come for; I can guess.
You've come to talk about Jesus' love, and repentance and rest and forgiveness!
You've come to say that my sin is great, yet greater the mercy Heaven will mete,
If I, like Magdalen, bend my head, and pour my tears at your Saviour's feet.
Your promise is fair, but I've little faith: I relied on promises once before;
They brought me to this—this prison cell, with its iron-barred window, its grated door!
Yet he, too, was fair who promised me, with his tender mouth and his Christ-like eyes;
And his voice was as sweet as the summer wind that sighs through the arbors of Paradise.
And he seemed to me all that was good and pure, and noble and strong, and true and brave!
I had given the pulse of my heart for him, and deemed it a precious boon to crave.
You say that Jesus so loved the world he died to redeem it from its sin:
It isn't redeemed, or no one could be so fair without, and so black within.
I trusted his promise, I gave my life;—the truth of my love is known on high,
If there is a God who knows all things;—his promise was false, his love was a lie! It was over soon, Oh! soon, the dream—and me, he had called "his life," "his light," He drove me away with a sneering word, and you Christians said that "it served me right." I was proud, Mr. Chaplain, even then; I set my face in the teeth of Fate, And resolved to live honestly, come what might, and sink beneath neither scorn nor hate. Yes, and I prayed that the Christ above would help to bear the bitter cross, And put something here, where my heart had been, to fill up the aching void of loss.
It's easy for you to say what I should do, but none of you ever dream how hard
Is the way that you Christians make for us, with your "sin no more," "trust the Lord."
When for days and days you are turned from work with cold politeness, or open sneer,
You get so you don't trust a far-off God, whose creatures are cold, and they, so near.
You hold your virtuous lives aloof, and refuse us your human help and hand,
And set us apart as accursèd things, marked with a burning, Cain-like brand.
But I didn't bend, though many days I was weary and hungry, and worn and weak,
And for many a starless night I watched, through tears that grooved down my pallid cheek.
They are all dry now! They say I'm hard, because I never weep or moan!
You can't draw blood when the heart's bled out! you can't find tears or sound in a stone!
And I don't know why I should be mild and meek: no one has been very mild to me. You say that Jesus would be—perhaps! but Heaven's a long way off, you see.
That will do; I know what you're going to say: "I can have it right here in this narrow cell."
The soul is slow to accept Christ's heav'n when his followers chain the body in hell. Not but I'm just as well off here—better, perhaps, than I was outside. The world was a prison-house to me, where I dwelt, defying and defied.
I don't know but I'd think more of what you say, if they'd given us both a common lot;
If justice to me had been justice to him, and covered our names with an equal blot;
But they took him into the social court, and pitied, and said he'd been "led astray";
In a month the stain on his name had passed, as a cloud that crosses the face of day! He joined the Church, and he's preaching now, just as you are, the love of God, And the duty of sinners to kneel and pray, and humbly to kiss the chastening rod. If they'd dealt with me as they dealt by him, may be I'd credit your Christian love; If they'd dealt with him as they dealt by me, I'd have more faith in a just Above.
I don't know, but sometimes I used to think that she, who was told there was no room
In the inn at Bethlehem, might look down with softened eyes thro' the starless gloom.
Christ wasn't a woman—he couldn't know the pain and endurance of it; but she, The mother who bore him, she might know, and Mary in Heaven might pity me. Still that was useless: it didn't bring a single mouthful for me to eat, Nor work to get it, nor sheltering from the dreary wind and the howling street. Heavenly pity won't pass as coin, and earthly shame brings a higher pay. Sometimes I was tempted to give it up, and go, like others, the easier way; But I didn't; no, sir, I kept my oath, though my baby lay in my arms and cried, And at last, to spare it—I poisoned it; and kissed its murdered lips when it died. I'd never seen him since it was born (he'd said that it wasn't his, you know); But I took its body and laid it down at the steps of his door, in the pallid glow Of the winter morning; and when he came, with a love-tune hummed on those lips of lies, It lay at his feet, with its pinched white face staring up at him from its dead, blue eyes; I hadn't closed them; they were like his, and so was the mouth and the curled gold hair, And every feature so like his own—for I am dark, sir, and he is fair. 'Twas a moment of triumph, that showed me yet there was a passion I could feel, When I saw him bend o'er its meagre form, and, starting backwards, cry out and reel! If there is a time when all souls shall meet the reward of the deeds that are done in the clay, When accused and accuser stand face to face, he will cry out so in the Judgment Day!
The rest? Oh, nothing. They hunted me, and with virtuous lawyers' virtuous tears
To a virtuous jury, convicted me; and I'm sentenced to stay here for twenty years.
Do I repent? Yes, I do; but wait till I tell you of what I repent, and why.
I repent that I ever believed a man could be anything but a living lie!
I repent because every noble thought, or hope, or ambition, or earthly trust,
Is as dead as dungeon-bleached bones in me—as dead as my child in its murdered dust!
Do I repent that I killed the babe? Am I repentant for that, you ask?
I'll answer the truth as I feel it, sir; I leave to others the pious mask.
Am I repentant because I saved its starving body from Famine's teeth?
Because I hastened what time would do, to spare it pain and relieve its death?
Am I repentant because I held it were better a grave should have no name Than a living being, whose only care must come from a mother weighed with shame? Am I repentant because I thought it were better the tiny form lay hid From the heartless stings of a brutal world, unknown, unnamed, 'neath a coffin lid? Am I repentant for the act, the last on earth in my power, to save From the long-drawn misery of life, in the early death and the painless grave? I'm glad that I did it! Start if you will! I'll repeat it over; I say I'm glad! No, I'm neither a fiend, nor a maniac—don't look as if I were going mad!
Did I not love it? Yes, I loved with a strength that you, sir, can never feel;