free-verse18 lines
Labour - Capital - Land.
by Francis William Lauderdale AdamsIn that rich archipelago of sea
With fiery hills, thick woods wherein the mias {79a}
Browses along the trees, and god-like men
Leave monuments of speech too large for us, {79b}
There are strange forest-trees. Far up, their roots
Spread from the central trunk, and settle down
Deep in the life-fed earth, seventy feet below.
In the past days here grew another tree,
On whose high fork the parasitic seed
Fell and sprang up, and, finding life and strength
In the disease, decrepitude and death
Of that it fed on, utterly consumed it,
And stands the monument of Nature's crime!
So Labour with his parasites, the two
Great swollen robbers, Land and Capital,
Stands to the gaze of men but as a heap
Of rotted dust whose only use must be
To rich the roots of the proud stem that killed it! {80}