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To Reformers in Despair
'Tis not too late to build our young land right,
Cleaner than Holland, courtlier than Japan,
Devout like early Rome, with hearths like hers,
Hearths that will recreate the breed called man.
poem by Vachel Lindsay
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A Tool To Scream
Goodbye, They breathe but cannot scream
They have no tools to build voices
They wait in fetal position
Martyrs on altars of mistakes
The martyr
They have not the tools to scream
They are just the ones upon the altars of mistakes
There is no safe place
The marytr
song performed by by Zao
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Altars of Man-made Wars
Men have always made altars for themselves:
Herod and the slaughter of the 2- year olds
Landlords and feudalism
Patriarchy and oppression of women
The Army and the Roman Empire
Hitler and Nazism
Mussolini and fascism
Mao Tse Tung and communism
Napoleon and militarism
Saddam Hussein and egoism
Osama bin laden and Islamism
George Bush and the wage against terrorism.
And in all these altars
It is the small children -
sacrificed as living offerings!
poem by Elizabeth Padillo Olesen
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It is easier to build two hearths than always to keep fire on one.
Jeremiah has to lament that there are as many altars as towns in Judah.
quote by Julius Wellhausen
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
quote by William Hazlitt
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Forward
I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes
In weary, woeful, waiting times;
In doleful hours of battle-din,
Ere yet they brought the wounded in;
Through vigils of the fateful night,
In lousy barns by candle-light;
In dug-outs, sagging and aflood,
On stretchers stiff and bleared with blood;
By ragged grove, by ruined road,
By hearths accurst where Love abode;
By broken altars, blackened shrines
I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes.
I've solaced me with scraps of song
The desolated ways along:
Through sickly fields all shrapnel-sown,
And meadows reaped by death alone;
By blazing cross and splintered spire,
By headless Virgin in the mire;
By gardens gashed amid their bloom,
By gutted grave, by shattered tomb;
Beside the dying and the dead,
Where rocket green and rocket red,
In trembling pools of poising light,
With flowers of flame festoon the night.
Ah me! by what dark ways of wrong
I've cheered my heart with scraps of song.
So here's my sheaf of war-won verse,
And some is bad, and some is worse.
And if at times I curse a bit,
You needn't read that part of it;
For through it all like horror runs
The red resentment of the guns.
And you yourself would mutter when
You took the things that once were men,
And sped them through that zone of hate
To where the dripping surgeons wait;
And wonder too if in God's sight
War ever, ever can be right.
Yet may it not be, crime and war
But effort misdirected are?
And if there's good in war and crime,
There may be in my bits of rhyme,
My songs from out the slaughter mill:
So take or leave them as you will.
poem by Robert William Service
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Humbling Habitat
The gray exhaust of twelve warm hearths
Chased the clouds into the afternoon sky.
There stood the stalwart mansion
At peace with its surroundings
And steadfast with its environs.
Beckoning an affectionate greeting
Just beyond the bridge, it appears
To give light the sublime levity
Of being a nuance of darkness.
Its façade is as prestigious and lucent
As a librarian’s bustline in her noblest estate.
Its walls of luminous windows
Sit still in a kinetic majesty of colors,
Like the yew tree in its bounty of crimson berries.
This refuge from the current disharmonies
Radiates from its midst an unheard music
And a conviviality suggesting a vicarious ecstacy.
Here, perhaps, is that first step in darkness
Of the empire prophesized to come,
Bringing its measureless song
Of the queen of the northern lights,
Whose monarch calms the most vociferous tempest
And warms the most bitter winter chill.
Here, under the clouds of mortal brevity,
Contained are the exotic reactions
To long suppers and golden evenings
From the replenishing of early traditions,
Beyond youth’s humblest dreams.
The twelve hearths fully aglow,
Fueled with only kindling atoms,
Tell of a future only they can know
And every human mind fathoms.
Within these high stone walls,
Lit by radiant lamps’ glare,
Every place an eye-beam falls,
There is the glory of confident flair.
poem by Albert Price
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Man is a being born to believe. And if no church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth to guide him, he will find altars and idols in his own heart and his own imagination.
quote by Benjamin Disraeli
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Will you permit the sacred fire of liberty, brought by your fathers from the venerable temples of Britain, to be quenched and trodden out on the simple altars they have raised?
quote by Joseph Howe
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Flower Of Aloe
HOW can I tell you how I love you, dear?
There is no music now the world is old;
The songs have all been sung, the tales all told
Broken the vows are all this many a year.
Had we but met when all the world was new,
When virgin blossoms decked untrodden fields,
I had plucked all the buds that summer yields
And woven a garland, worthy even of you.
Or had I sung when rhymes were yet unwed,
And crowned their marriage in the songs I made,
I had laid them down before you unafraid,
Meet offering to your grace and goodlihead.
But all the dreams are dreamed, and no new heat
Touches life's altars, all the scents are burnt,
The truths all taught and all the lessons learnt,
And no new stars lead kings to kiss Love's feet.
For now in this grey world, of youth bereft,
Love has no throne, no sceptre and no crown;
His groves are hushed, his altars are cast down,
And we who worship--we have nothing left.
And yet--your lips ! The God has built him there
An altar which has known nor flower nor flame:
There may we burn the incense to Love's name,
There the immortal virgin rose be fair.
So--since my lips have known but one desire,
And all my flowers of life are vowed to you--
For us, at least, the old world has something new:
For me the altar--and for you the fire!
poem by Edith Nesbit
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Verses Occasion'd By The Sickness Of Mrs. Anne Donnellan.
Goddess of Health, where--e'er you dwell,
To Philomela fly;
O hasten from your rural Cell,
Nor let the Fair one die.
Again her Voice divine restore,
And give her Eyes their Fire;
So shall a World thy Pow'r adore,
And raise thy Altars higher.
poem by Mary Barber
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Resurrection
Once more I hear the everlasting sea
Breathing beneath the mountain's fragrant
breast,
Come unto Me, come unto Me,
And I will give you rest.
We have destroyed the Temple and in three days
He hath rebuilt it -- all things are made new:
And hark what wild throats pour His praise
Beneath the boundless blue.
We plucked down all His altars, cried aloud
And gashed ourselves for little gods of clay!
Yon floating cloud was but a cloud,
The May no more than May.
We plucked down all His altars, left not one
Save where, perchance (and ah, the joy was fleet),
We laid our garlands in the sun
At the white Sea-born's feet.
We plucked down all His altars, not to make
The small praise greater, but the great praise less,
We sealed all fountains where the soul could slake
Its thirst and weariness.
"Love" was too small, too human to be found
In that transcendent source whence love was
born:
We talked of "forces": heaven was crowned
With philosophic thorn.
"Your God is in your image," we cried, but O,
'Twas only man's own deepest heart ye gave,
Knowing that He transcended all ye know,
While -- we dug His grave.
Denied Him even the crown on our own brow,
E'en these poor symbols of His loftier reign,
Levelled His Temple with the dust, and now
He is risen, He is risen again,
Risen, like this resurrection of the year,
This grand ascension of the choral spring,
Which those harp-crowded heavens bend to hear
And meet upon the wing.
"He is dead," we cried, and even amid that gloom
The wintry veil was rent! The new-born day
Showed us the Angel seated in the tomb
And the stone rolled away.
It is the hour! We challenge heaven above
Now, to deny our slight ephemeral breath
Joy, anguish, and that everlasting love
Which triumphs over death.
poem by Alfred Noyes
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In Error
They burnt a corpse upon the sand--
The light shone out afar;
It guided home the plunging dhows
That beat from Zanzibar.
Spirit of Fire, where'er Thy altars rise,
Thou art the Light of Guidance to our eyes!
poem by Rudyard Kipling
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I like visiting people's homes on Saint Joseph's Day, when people set up altars, serve food as a tribute to the saint, and invite the public - I enjoy that much more than Mardi Gras.
quote by Poppy Z. Brite
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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An Angel in the House
How sweet it were, if without feeble fright,
Or dying of the dreadful beauteous sight,
An angel came to us, and we could bear
To see him issue from the silent air
At evening in our room, and bend on ours
His divine eyes, and bring us from his bowers
News of dear friends, and children who have never
Been dead indeed,--as we shall know forever.
Alas! we think not what we daily see
About our hearths,--angels that are to be,
Or may be if they will, and we prepare
Their souls and ours to meet in happy air;--
A child, a friend, a wife whose soft heart sings
In unison with ours, breeding its future wings.
poem by James Henry Leigh Hunt
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Two races share today the soil of Canada. These people had not always been friends. But I hasten to say it. There is no longer any family here but the human family. It matters not the language people speak, or the altars at which they kneel.
quote by Wilfrid Laurier
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Home
So long had I travelled the lonely road,
Though, now and again, a wayfairing friend
Walked shoulder to shoulder, and lightened the load,
I often would think to myself as I strode,
No comrade will journey with you to the end.
And it seemed to me, as the days went past,
And I gossiped with cronies, or brooded alone,
By wayside fires, that my fortune was cast
To sojourn by other men's hearths to the last,
And never to come to my own hearthstone.
The lonely road no longer I roam.
We met, and were one in the heart's desire.
Together we came, through the wintry gloam,
To the little old house by the cross-ways, home;
And crossed the threshold, and kindled the fire.
poem by Wilfred Wilson Gibson
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Fragment: Milton's Spirit
I dreamed that Milton's spirit rose, and took
From life's green tree his Uranian lute;
And from his touch sweet thunder flowed, and shook
All human things built in contempt of man,--
And sanguine thrones and impious altars quaked,
Prisons and citadels...
poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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