IN ALABAMA WOODS
OUT OF DOORS
THE SANDS
THE BAD LITTLE COO-BIRD
A WALK, WALK, WALK
AUNT ELIZA
A DREAM OF GOLD
THE MELANCHOLY RABBIT
A USE OF MEMORY
MOTION
CLOSED DOORS
CALIFORNIA COLORS
UP AND DOWN
FULL MOTHERHOOD
There are children many — this child is mine;
Shall I love them all or only one?
What motherhood is the world’s design?
Born of a known and honored line,
Blossom of love, an only son —
There are children many, this child is mine;
But what of the others who starve and pine,
Where no wise mother tasks are done?
What motherhood is the world’s design?
Unless my baby is fair and fine
The game is lost and the race not run;
There are children many, this child is mine.
Unless we love both mine and thine,
Heaven on earth can come for none —
What motherhood is the world’s design?
We must care for all with a love divine;
Only so may the game be won;
There are children many — this child is mine —
Full motherhood is the world’s design.
TO MOTHERS
In the name of your ages to anguish!
In the name of the curse and the stain!
By the strength of your sorrow I call you
By the power of your pain!
We are mothers. Through us in our bondage,
Through us with a brand in the face,
Be we fettered with gold or with iron,
Through us comes the race.
With the weight of all sin on our shoulders,
Midst the serpents of shame ever curled,
We have sat, unresisting, defenseless, —
Making the men of the world!
We were ignorant long, and our children
Were besotted and brutish and blind,
King-driven, priest-ridden, — who are they
Our children — mankind.
We were kept for our beauty, our softness,
Our sex, — what reward do ye find?
We transmit, must transmit, being mothers,
What we are to mankind!
As the mother so follow the children!
No nation, wise, noble and brave,
Ever sprang, — though the father had freedom, —
From the mother, — a slave.
Look now at the world as ye find it!
Blench not! Truth is kinder than lies!
Look now at the world — see it suffer!
Listen now to its cries!
See the people who suffer, all people!
All humanity wasting its powers!
In a hand to hand struggle — death dealing —
All children of ours!
The blind millionaire — the blind harlot —
The blind preacher leading the blind —
Only think of the pain, how it hurts them!
Our little blind babies — mankind!
Shall we bear it? We mothers who love them.
Can we bear it? We mothers who feel
Every pang of our babes and forgive them
Every sin when they kneel?
Little stumbling world! You have fallen!
You are crying in darkness and fear!
Wait, darling, your mother is coming!
Hush, darling, your mother is here!
We are here like an army with banners
The great flag of our freedom unfurled!
With us rests the fate of the nations,
For we make the world!
Dare ye sleep while your children are calling?
Dare ye wait while they clamor unfed?
Dare ye pray in the proud pillared churches
While they suffer for bread?
If the farmer hath sinned he shall answer,
If he check thee laugh back at his powers!
Shall a mother be kept from her children?
These people are ours!
They are ours! He is ours, for we made him!
In our arms he has nestled and smiled!
Shall we, the world-mothers, be hindered
By the freaks of a child?
Rise now in the power of The Woman!
Rise now in the power of our need!
The world cries in hunger and darkness!
We shall light! We shall feed!
In the name of our ages of anguish!
In the name of the curse and the slain!
By the strength of our sorrow we conquer!
In the power of our pain!
WE EAT AT HOME
We eat at home. We do not care
Of what insanitary fare;
So that our mother makes the pie
Content we live, content we die,
And proudly our dyspepsia bear.
Straight from our furred forefather’s lair
The instinct comes of feeding there;
And still unmoved by progress high
We eat at home.
In wasteful ignorance we buy
Alone, alone our food we fry —
What if a tenfold cost we bear?
The doctor’s bill — the dentist’s chair?
Still without ever asking why
We eat at home.
SPECIAL DRY TOAST
(RAILROAD “DINER”)
“Special dry toast” — at fifteen cents;
Once five, then ten, but late events
Show heights in railroad bills of fare
At which poor passengers may stare,
Leaving to reckless opulence
“Special dry toast.”
Nor are these portions so immense
As to condone their rank offense;
Fractions of slices close they pare,
Three tiny fragments crisping there —
“Special dry toast.”
The public, patient, meek and dense,
Complains not, in its innocence,
That five-cent loaves, in this wise care,
Sell for a dollar, share by share,
Well named, in their cool impudence —
“Special Dry Toast.”
CHILD LABOR
The children in the Poor House
May die of many an ill,
But the Poor House does not profit
By their labor in the mill.
The children in the Orphanage
Wear raiment far from fine,
But no Orphanage is financed
By child labor in a mine.
Only the loving family
Which we so much admire
Is willing to support itself
By little children’s hire.
Only the human father,
A man, with power to think,
Will take from little children
The price of food and drink.
Only the human mother,
Degraded helpless thing,
Will make her little children work
And live on what they bring.
No fledgling feeds the father-bird,
No chicken feeds the hen,
No kitten mouses for the cat,
This glory is for men.
We are the wisest strongest race,
Long may our praise be sung,
The only animal alive
That feeds upon its young.
We make the poverty that takes
The lives of children so,
We can awake, rebuild, remake,
And let our children grow.
EN BANC
Associate Justices of Court Supreme!
Stern arbiters of destiny in law!
Thy gathered dignity and power would seem
Aug
ust a thing as people ever saw.
Associate Justices of Court Supreme!
Sitting en banc to punish for contempt;
To see you sitting, who would ever dream
That you from such opinion were exempt?
A crowded room with vulgar men who spit —
Spit on the crimson carpet without shame.
This before Justice — in the sight of it —
The highest thing for which we have a name!
Then “Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye!” is the cry,
We rise, they shamble in, the court room stares,
While these great Justices en banc go by
And take possession of their rocking-chairs.
Their rocking-chairs. Their cane-backed rocking-chairs!
Wherein they swing and dandle to and fro,
Lounging and stretching has lazy airs
As smoking-rooms and billiard parlors know.
Grave issues hang on every spoken word,
The people listen, whispering in pairs,
The case proceeds, and through it all is heard
The steady squeaking of their rocking-chairs.
How can we honor Justice when ’tis seen
In men who shame her temple (or her tomb),
Who can insult the Goddess with a mien
That would debar them from a drawing-room?
No reverence is too deep from those who claim
The highest ground that mortal soul has trod;
Those who serve Justice, standing in her name,
Serve in the presence of the living God.
A PSALM OF LIVES
(WITH APOLOGIES TO LONGFELLOW.)
They tell now us in mystic numbers
Life is all a Freudian dream,
For the soul is safe that slumbers —
Things are worse than what they seem.
Life is sex; in life thou burnest,
In the grave a smouldering coal,
Lust thou art to lust returnest
They are writing of the soul.
Not enjoyment and not sorrow
Is our destined end or way,
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us coarser than today.
Art is long and time is fleeting,
And no matter how we look
Still our secret sins are beating
Records for a beastlier book.
For the publishers wide battle,
For this barbecue of “Lives”;
Be not like clean peaceful cattle,
Be a Bluebeard rich in wives.
Trust the future’s tales unpleasant,
Let no past respect its dead
Act, act, in the living present
For biographers ahead.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives unclean,
And, departing, leave behind us
Data for more books obscene
Stories that perhaps another,
Tired of misbehavior vain,
A blase and wearied brother,
Reading, may begin again.
Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any shame,
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to live for long ill-fame.
I WOULD FAIN DIE A DRY DEATH
The American public is patient,
The American public is slow,
The American public will stand as much
As any public I know.
We submit to be killed by our railroads,
We submit to be fooled by our press,
We can stand as much government scandal
As any folks going, I guess,
We can bear bad air in the subway,
We can bear quick death in the street,
But we are a little particular
About the things we eat.
It is not so much that it kills us —
We are used to being killed;
But we like to know what fills us
When we pay for being filled.
When we pay the Beef Trust prices,
As we must, or go without,
It is not that we grudge the money
But we grudge the horrid doubt.
Is it ham or trichinosis?
Can a label command belief?
Is it pork we have purchased, or poison?
Is it tuberculosis or beef?
There is really a choice of diseases,
To any one, little or big;
And no man really pleases
To die of a long dead pig.
We take our risks as we’re able,
On elevator and train,
But to sit in peace at the table
And be seized with sudden pain
When we are at home and happy —
Is really against the grain.
And besides, admitting the poison,
Admitting we all must die,
Accepting the second-hand sickness
From a cholera-smitten stye;
Patiently bearing the murder,
Amiable, meek, inert, —
We do rise up and remonstrate
Against the Packingtown dirt.
Let there be death in the dinner,
Subtle and unforeseen,
But O, Mr. Packer, in packing our death,
Won’t you please to pack it clean!
A DIET UNDESIRED
He was set to keep a flock of sheep,
And they seemed to him too slow;
So he took great pains to improve their brains
With food to make them grow.
But they would not eat the high-spiced meat
For all that he could say;
His scorn was wasted and the food untasted
For the sheep weren’t made that way.
He would make them take his good beefsteak!
So he raged day after day;
But his anger deep was lost on the sheep —
For they were not made that way.
WHY? TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
1915 — 1916
Why does America sit so still,
Watching all Europe die?
Doing nothing, or good, or ill,
To stop Red Death and Idiot Waste,
While the little nations, closer placed,
Beg for aid of the power we hold?
Why do we sit, unmoved and cold,
And the need of the world deny?
Answer, America! — Why?
Why does America stain her hands
With blood that will never dry?
With war-priced wealth from helpless lands —
Speculating in Death Preferred;
Refusing to let her voice be heard
In the Council of Nations which may avail
To end the Horror? And, though it fail,
Why should we fail to try?
Answer, America! — Why?
Why does America turn away
From Europe’s bitter cry? —
Death of the young men day by day,
Ruin of woman and child and land —
War will stop when the nations stand
Leagued together in Union wide;
Why does our nation turn aside
And let the First Call go by?
Answer, America! — Why?
THE INTERNATIONALIST
He spoke with pride as a superior soul,
“I am an Internationalist” said he,
No pent up Utica of native land
Commands allegience of my heart & hand,
I am not thrilled by any flag unfurled
Unless it be the flag of all the world,
Nationless, free.”
“An Internationalist,” I slow replied,
“Nation” I know, and “inter” is between,
But in between the nations, on the map,
There is no room for anyone, poor chap!
Their borders touch — still, if you s
o hate slaughter,
You might be International — in water,
At sea, I mean.
When nations as our states have done, unite
Each seeing the advantage due to him,
A Federated World will surely grow,
By natural laws which we already know,
But if no native land you can endure,
And this adopted one you find so poor —
Go swim! Go swim!
AN ARMY WITH BANNERS
Together men faced the mammoth,
Together men stood to fight,
Together knew life and glory,
Together met death and night.
And because they stood together,
For the safety of the whole,
Courage and comradeship were born —
The ancient army’s soul.
While, all the years, poor, weak, dull-eyed, alone,
The men who toiled, toiled on, each for his own.
The army was rich with banners,
The uniforms gay with gold.
To music the charge rushed headlong,
To music their steps were told.
They were strong in their conscious numbers,
They were led by a clear command,
And the glory of each was glory
Because all could understand.
Bannerless, silent, in ignoble dress,
Men toiled, alone, in dim confused distress.
Yet the deeds of the army with banners
Were of slaughter and pain and strife,
While the deeds of the bannerless lonely men
Keep all the world in life.
Some day they will see that their work is one,
In the service of the whole —
Then the standards rise and the music cries,
And the army finds its soul.
THE GUNMAN
Prowling in the alley, loafing in the bar,
Chancing his swift “get-away” in a stolen car;
Vermin of the city, whose bite is sure to kill,
Hired by wiser villains to work vicarious ill;
Not for hate or vengeance or quarrel of his own,
In sordid risk and danger this savage strikes alone.
Life to him is merchandise, crime he sneers away,
Carelessly he murders for a little pay,
Killing, for his profit, a man he never saw —
Thug — assassin — gunman — laughing at the law.
Honored and defended by church and bench and bar,
Proud in his park and palace, steam yacht and private car,
Giver to school and college, to charitable care,
Patron of art and science, a multi-millionaire.
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 186
