Ambrose Bierce

In contact, lo! the flint and steel, By sharp and flame, the thought reveal That he the metal, she the stone,

A conqueror as provident as brave, He robbed the cradle to supply the grave. His reign laid quantities of human dust:

I dreamed I stood upon a hill, and, lo! The godly multitudes walked to and fro Beneath, in Sabbath garments fitly clad,

Thou shalt no God but me adore: 'Twere too expensive to have more. No images nor idols make

The cur foretells the knell of parting day; The loafing herd winds slowly o'er the lea; The wise man homewards plods; I only stay

Freedom, as every schoolboy knows, Once shrieked as Kosciusko fell; On every wind, indeed, that blows

The pig is taught by sermons and epistles To think the God of Swine has snout and bristles.

The rimer quenches his unheeded fires, The sound surceases and the sense expires. Then the domestic dog, to east and west,

Once I seen a human ruin In a elevator-well. And his members was bestrewin'

Day of Satan's painful duty! Earth shall vanish, hot and sooty; So says Virtue, so says Beauty.

The flabby wine-skin of his brain Yields to some pathologic strain, And voids from its unstored abysm

Have but one God: thy knees were sore If bent in prayer to three or four. Adore no images save those

How blest the land that counts among Her sons so many good and wise, To execute great feats of tongue

O Liberty, God-gifted, Young and immortal maid, In your high hand uplifted,

Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see, And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth,

Words shouting, singing, smiling, frowning Sense lacking. Ah, nothing, more obscure than Browning,