The change

Sometimes I feel I understand what feeling is made of,
why clouds follow a storm, why earth seems to remain still

while its twilight breaks till there's only the soot of it left,
a residue charred by a day whose world is getting older.

Stars blink at me in a sudden moment; but when the embers
of creation have petered out, I feel I’ll know the meaning

of all blackness. I’ll give myself to the mystic of its life
in order to see the truth of how fine a truth our birth was.

At other times I listen to voices of change, and from them
learn that there are things even the mental cannot calculate;

the lame, the starved, the enslaved, those beaten into assent
with the sjambok of faith. These I have failed to comprehend.

So I say go on, brethren, into town and country and village,
and turn that dark page of the sky into something that is blue

again; progress to the power seat till you can advance no more
and there, at the edge of yourselves, turn pauper into king.