My People

Stranger:
What kind your people are
I would wish to know:
Great-shouldered men like rolling stock,
Great in despair,
Simple in prayer,
And their hard hands tear
The soil on the rock
Where the plough cannot go?

Poet:
'Tis not so.
Faint-hearted folk my people are,
To Poverty's house they have never invited
The giant Pride,
But awaits the world where wrongs are righted.
They till their fields and scape among the stones
Because they cannot be schoolmasters –
They work because Judge Want condemns the drones.
Dear stranger, duty is a joke
Among my peasant folk.

Stranger:
Poet be fair,
You surely must have seen
Beneath these of care
Hearts that were not mean
And beggarly and faint.

Poet:
O curious stranger, why
Should poet seek to prove
The spirit of a saint?
For one in love
Would never probe or pry
Into the mysteried cove
Where all that is God's
Is safe from hurtling clods.
I cannot tell you what you ask
But I will tell you other things –
I will fill the flask
Of your curiosity with bittering.

Stranger:
I will go
To my town back again
And never desire to know
The heart of your women and men.

Poet:
Our women are humble as dust,
They suck the hard crust,
They suckle our children, and we
Drink the milk of love's mystery.

Stranger:
I will go
To my townful of vermin
That sways to and fro
Like fool-heads at a sermon.
I will our out for them
Your vitriol of hell.