Classic Poem

Out of the earth, out of the earth
The innumerable dead
Thrust forth their phantom hands to seize
The living overhead;
Ancestral hands from every field,
By every hut and hill;
Ancestral hands that ever wield
Strong Superstition's will;
Ancestral hands by every grave,
And graves are everywhere,
Though strong sweet grain might grow instead
To lighten famine's care.

Out of the earth, out of the earth,
North, east and south and west,
The souls of father, brother, son,
Crave worship, without rest;
Claim rites and reverence and fear,
For Ill is in their hands;
Claim progeny, who too must rear
Yet more, for death's demands;
Claim sons—and sons—though millions starve,
And millions see no shape
But that of Hunger, gaunt and bare,
From which is no escape.

Out of the earth—the haunted earth!—
O is there no surcease?
Will Custom never loose its clutch
Upon this people's peace?
Must life be ever slave to death—
A coolie at the tomb?
Must it for ever draw no breath
But where the grave has room?
Must not a fruit or flower spring
But they are corpse-begot?
O shall there be no fair expanse
The buried do not blot?

God of the world, of the wide world,
To carven stick or stone
Should all these millions rather pray
Than unto rotted bone.
Or rather to the earth, the moon,
To light the warm sun gives,
To Spring, to Summer on the hills—
To anything that lives!
So let the wind of Knowledge sweep
From Thibet to the sea
And save the living from the dead,
Now and eternally.
Yea, let the cleansing of it flash,
Until this land again
Shall be no charnel, but the home
Of free and living men.