Poetry Fragment 1

Men of the Eastern World -before you is a choice?
Will you listen to idle schemes or hearken to My voice—
Your former War Lord, now a commissar,
Is proffering you worldly things to brighten his own star,
Dividing, for the moment the land that you would own,
Demanding, on the morrow, the harvest you have sown,
Presenting you, in certain terms, the tinsel and the glitter,
Giving you, without terms, the servile and the bitter,
A People’s government—without democracy,
A People’s charter—without humanity.
Taking away the wretched chains that once held you in thrall,
With a mirage of happiness, for one and all,
And the great land of China, awakening from sleep,
Finds a tomb instead of a bed, to be buried deep,
Until the human heart awakes, and makes a firm demand,
That every one of every faith, must share in the land,
Must share in the sowing and the reaping of the grain,
And universal sacrifice brings universal gain.

Shade of Karl Marx, wherever you are.
Will you accept the Commissar?
Will you accept the slave-camp and the whip knout,
The ubiquitous wiping out
Of all the enemies of the so-called state?
Was this to be the automatic fate
Of workers, so long kept in chains,
What remains
Of the communistic manifest,
In this final test.

Will the lovers of Me go back to My early words?
Will the churches of Me depend upon My teachings?
Will the devotees of Me think a little less of themselves,
And in their great love try to exemplify
The good tidings, or face with equanimity
The holocaust that threatens all humanity.

What has been sown determines what shall reaped—
Be it love, be it hate, be it peace, be it war—
What has been sown, determines what shall be reaped.
From Senator Immunity to the bombing of great cities,
From selfish Community to the innumerable slave-camps,
The aroused emotions shall poison the atmosphere,
The disturbed feelings will burst like a hurricane,
And death shall rule the world, if love does not,
The plagues of Moses and the presentations of the Apocalypse
Shall manifest before a wretched world,
That places freedom before the teachings of its Lord,
That places revolution before the teachings of its Lord,
That places anything before the teachings of its Lord.