New Poetry - Modernist Magazines Project

Ill
Pillage the great unruly crowd invites
To take the bourgeois palaces by storm.
The sheets of glass, the softly shaded lights
Attract, induce the ugly murmuring swarm.
Fingers that grab, and hands that overturn
Obey their prompted nostrils over-wrought
With female scent diffused, and rebels burn
What in their slavery they would once have bought.
Into charred ash high priced silks disappear,
Up blazes all the furniture of class
And frightened lift-girls fill the shafts with fear
Wounded by splinters of the shivering glass.
Basement and Mezzanine with turmoil swell,
But look ! some little Lenin of the mob
Breaks with harsh reprimand the lustful spell
Raising his voice : " Our task is not to rob
44 Since not to us but to the workers' state
These folded silks, this glittering trash belong.
For us meanwhile more pregnant works await
Than useless vengeance adding wrong to wrong.
" No doubt in time you too such silks shall wear
When luxury shall crown the common toil
And jewels glitter in the shop girl's hair
And gold and silver round her wrists shall coil
44 Symbols of love, relating then no more
To the exploited, suffering, human mass,
Incentive to no vast imperial war
But innocent and valueless as glass.
44 Then bide your time. That time has not come yet.
Meantime replace the spoil, put out the flames.
At every entrance let a guard be set."
Thus in his generous anger he exclaims.