Page:Posthumous poems (IA posthumousswinb00swin).pdf/202

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POSTHUMOUS POEMS
Still bleached in sun and rain,
Lie the forgotten slain
On bleak slopes of the dismal mountain-range.
Still the wide eagle-wings
Brood o'er the sleep of Kings,
Whose purples shake notin the wind of change.
Still our lost land is beautiful in vain,
Where priests and kings defile with blood and lies
The glory of the inviolable skies;
Still from that loathsome lair
Where crawls the sickening air,
Heavy with poison, stagnant as despair,
Where soul and body moulder in one chain
Of inward-living pain
From wasted lives, and hopes proved unavailing;
In utterance harsh and strange,
With many a fitful change,
In laughter and in tears,
In triumph and in fears,
The voice of earth goes heavenward for revenge:
And all the children of her dying year
  Fill up the unbroken strains
From priestly tongues that scathe with lies and vailing
The Bourbons' murderous dotard, sick of blood,
To the "How-long" of stricken spirits, wailing
  Before the throne of God.

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