Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, GROTESQUE, by RUTH GUTHRIE HARDING



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

GROTESQUE, by                    
First Line: With the first light on the skyline came the rapping of the sickles
Last Line: "and the fields with harvest teeming have forgot them all too soon!"
Alternate Author Name(s): Burton, Richard, Mrs.
Subject(s): Fields; Injustice; Labor & Laborers; Memory; Slavery; United States - Race Relations; Pastures; Meadows; Leas; Work; Workers; Serfs


With the first light on the skyline came the rapping of the sickles
And the brown arms of the reapers bent to toil another morn;
Close beside me in the glimmer, in the golden sweep and shimmer,
Knelt a reaper strange among us, crooning thro' the ragged corn:
"Born of sorrow,
Gone to-morrow —
Gone to lie in yonder valley where their fathers long have lain;
Men who know not ship nor sabre,
Each but drudges by his neighbor,
And the fields wherein they labor are a heritage of pain!"

Sleep was heavy on our eyelids when a lone star followed sunset,
But we missed the pale young stranger, none knew whither he had gone —
Then, from where the dead are lying, with the nightwind's tender sighing
Rose and fell a last low cadence of the voice we heard at dawn:
"Weary reapers,
Early sleepers —
Brief the glow that drifts across them from the waning August moon:
These that rest beyond its gleaming
Lie unvexed of drift or dreaming,
And the fields with harvest teeming have forgot them all too soon!"





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