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Robert Laurence Binyon - The Deportation
Work rating: Low

I
 In vain, in vain, in vain!
 Conqueror, you are conquered: though you grind
 These bodies, heel on neck; and though you twist
 Out of them the exquisite last wrench of pain,
 They rise, they rise again,
 Rise quivering and eternally resist
 All cunning that all cruelty can find
 To mock the heart and lacerate the mind
 In vain, in vain!


II
 The train stands packed for exile, truck on truck.
 Men thronged like oxen, pressed against each other,
 With worse than anger in their dangerous eyes,
 Look on their drivers, armed and helmeted,--
 Then forget all in sudden stormy cries
 As past the bayonets sister, wife, and mother
 Strain up to them, clutch fingers tight, are struck
 And beaten back, but struggle and press again,
 Catch desolated kisses, fight for breath
 To sob their widowed hearts out in a word
 Their man shall hear, reckless of wound or death
 So they come nigh him; a farewell insane,
 A passion as if the earth that bore them heard
 And in her bones groaned! And white children held
 On shoulders where the torn dress hangs in strips
 Cry Father! and mute answers wring the lips
 Of the exiles, in their torture still unquelled.

 A whistle screams. The guards drive, shout, beat. Then
 An inspiration like an ecstasy
 Seizes these women, and they rush to throw
 Their sobbing bodies prone upon the tracks
 Before the panting engine. If their men
 Into that night of slavery must go,
 They`ll be with death before them! Prostrate there,
 Tear--blinded, with tense arms and heaving backs,
 Young wife and child and mother of grey hair
 Clutch the rails, anguished and athirst to die,
 While over them the towering engine throbs,
 Blind, ignorant, deaf, and ready. But you spare
 Such easiness of end, you who did this
 Which the sun looked on, and which History
 Shall see for ever. Though they cling with sobs
 To their own earth, frenzied and bleeding, swift
 They are harried up; the bayonets prise and lift
 And tear away their hands` despairing grasp:
 They are tossed on either side: at the engine`s hiss
 The wheels begin that road which curses pave
 Between those piteous heaps that cry and gasp
 Helpless, and cheated even of their grave.


III
 But something lives and burns
 More perilous to assail
 Than flesh of bodies frail:
 It waits and it returns.
 And when in the night you dream
 Of the day that you did this thing,
 When you see those eyes and the bayonets` gleam
 And the shrieks to your very heart`s blood ring
 As you do your deed in your dream again,
 The soul of the race that you racked, to do
 Your Lord`s command, that you thought to have cowed,
 Shall sharpen the bitterness thrice for you
 As it rises before you, crying aloud:
 You did it in vain, in vain!
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