Weary men, what reap ye? - Golden corn for the stranger. <br />What sow ye? - Human corpses that wait for the avenger. <br />Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing? <br />Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger's scoffing. <br />There's a proud array of soldiers - what do they round your door? <br />They guard our masters' granaries from the thin hands of the poor. <br />Pale mothers, wherefore weeping - Would to God that we were dead; <br />Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread. <br /> <br />We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride, But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died. <br />Now is your hour of pleasure - bask ye in the world's caress; <br />But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses, <br />>From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin'd masses, <br />For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes. <br />A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we'll stand, <br />And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.<br /><br />Jane Francesca Wilde<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-famine-year/
