Words: 308
Mill Children We have forgotten how to sing: our laughter is a godless thing: listless and loud and shrill and sly. We have forgotten how to smile. Our lips, our voices too are vile. We are all dead before we die. Our mothers’ mothers made us so: the father that we never know in blindness and in wantonness Caused us to come to question you. What is it that you others do, that profit so by our distress? You and your children softly sleep. We and our mothers vigil pep. You cheated us of all delight, Ere our sick spirits came to birth: you made our fair and fruitful earth a nest Of pestilence and blight.
Your black machines are never still, and hard, relentless, as your will, they card us like the cotton waste. And flesh and blood more cheap than they, they seize and eat and shred away, to feed the fever of your haste. For we are waste and shoddy here, who know no God, no faith but fear, no happiness, no hope but sleep. Half imbecile and half obscene we sit and tend to each tense machine, too sick to sigh, too tired to weep, Until the tortured end of day, when fevered faces turn away, o see the stars from blackness leap.
The Smell of Death Is on Them By: Caroline Phenomenon Dost know these shining dames Who toil not, neither do they spin? Their names Spell gold–yet tears I see on every thread Of costly clothing; by their side the dead smell who died to weave that cloth! Cants tell Them from the lilies of the field? Its well! Or in the still hours of the night cants tell The sobs of children from the dreadful noise Machines make, when–deprived of childhood’s toys.