Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre

Chapter 35: MARSH-BLOOM

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About This Book

The collection assembles poems, essays, sketches, and short stories that articulate a sustained critique of authority and social injustice while championing individual liberty and free thought. Poetic pieces alternate between personal meditation, memorial verse, and social protest; essays examine anarchist ideas, direct action, literary criticism, education, gender and labor issues, and responses to contemporary events and figures; sketches and stories dramatize moral dilemmas and the struggles of ordinary lives. An introductory biographical sketch and editorial notes place the selections in context and underscore the author's evolving political convictions and commitment to emancipatory reform.

MARSH-BLOOM

(To Gaetano Bresci.)

Requiem, requiem, requiem,
Blood-red blossom of poison stem
Broken for Man,
Swamp-sunk leafage and dungeon bloom,
Seeded bearer of royal doom,
What now is the ban?

What to thee is the island grave?
With desert wind and desolate wave
Will they silence Death?
Can they weight thee now with the heaviest stone?
Can they lay aught on thee with "Be alone,"
That hast conquered breath?

Lo, "it is finished"—a man for a king!
Mark you well who have done this thing:
The flower has roots;
Bitter and rank grow the things of the sea;
Ye shall know what sap ran thick in the tree
When ye pluck its fruits.

Requiem, requiem, requiem,
Sleep on, sleep on, accursed of them
Who work our pain;
A wild Marsh-blossom shall blow again
From a buried root in the slime of men,
On the day of the Great Red Rain.

Philadelphia, July, 1901.