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With hollow eyes that cannot weep, and for words your faces wan?

No; the blood is dead within our veins—we care not now for life;

Let us die hid in the ditches, far from children and from wife;

Let us die hid in the ditches, far from children and from wife;

We cannot stay and listen to their raving, famished cries—

Bread! Bread! Bread! and none to still their agonies.

We left our infants playing with their dead mother's hand:

We left our maidens maddened by the fever's scorching brand:

Better, maiden, thou were strangled in thy own dark-twisted tresses—

Better, infant, thou wert smothered in thy mother's first caresses.

We are fainting in our misery, but God will hear our groan;

Yet, if fellow-men desert us, will He hearken from His Throne?

Accursed are we in our own land, yet toil we still and toil;

But the stranger reaps our harvest—the alien owns our soil.

O Christ! how have we sinned, that on our native plains

We perish houseless, naked, starved, with branded brow, like Cain's?