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Show '"Race S'utcide" is the Uheme of the Tost of the S'ierras. Joaquin Miller's New Book of Verse Deals Frankly With the Subject. President Roosevelt in swaddling clothing, suspended sus-pended by ribbons from the mouth of a stork, furnishes the illustration for the title page of a new poem copyrighted by Joaquin Miller, poet of the Sierras. "As It Was in the Beginning" is the title of the work, which is in ten cantos, and concerning con-cerning it the poet says, in what he calls a prefatory pre-fatory postscript: "When, like a sentinel on his watch 'tower, the president, with his divine audacity and San Juan valor, voiced the heart of the Americans against 'race suicide,' I hastened to do my part in my own way, ill or well, in holding up his hands on the firing line. For I had wrought here and fought here while he was still at school. But I was alone then, and as the stork had not so notably no-tably disappeared from the homes of those best able to welcome and entertain him, my book no more welcome to them then than the h , now. "However, I venture this new book with confidence, con-fidence, not only because it is right, proper, clean, courageous, but now seems opportune. 'Let the galled jade wince!' I give no Quarter and ask none, except pardon for errors incident to great haste. I cry aloud from my mountain top, as a seer, and say: The cherry blossom bird of Nippon must be mort with us, else another century and prolific Canada, like another Germany from the north, may descend upon us and take back train-loads train-loads of tribute. We are coming to be too entirely en-tirely Frenchish." In his treatment of the "race suicide" prob-lem, prob-lem, the "Poet of the Sierras," as becomes a man of the mountains, is very frank at time sledge-hammery. sledge-hammery. For instance, in the seventeenth and eighteenth stanzas of canto IX: God's pity for the breasts that bear A little babe, then banish it To strange hands, to alien care, To live or die as chance sees fit. Poor, helpless hands, reached anywhere, As God gave them to reach and reach, With only helplessness in each! Poor little hands, pushed here, pushed there, H And all night long for mother's breast, j H Poor restless hands that will not rest I H And gather strength to reach out strong H To mother in the rosy morn! ! Nay, nay, they gather scorn for scorn M And hate for hate the lorn night long ' M Poor dying babe! to reach about ! M In blackness, as a thing cast out! God's pity for the thing of lust , H That bears a frail babe to be thrust H Forth from her arms to alien thrall, ' As shutting out the light of day, j M As shutting off God'3 very breath! M But thrice God's pity, let us pray, M For her who bears no babe at all, H But gaily leads up Fashion's Hall . M And grinning leads the dance of death. j M That sexless, steel-braced breast of bone j M Is like to some assassin cell, A whited sepulcher of stone, r M A graveyard at the gates of hell, ' M A mart where motherhood is sold, I M A house of murders manifold! M A few stanzas further on the poet says: j M And oh, for prophet's tongue or pen M To scourge not only, and accuse , M The childless mother, but such men M As know their wives but to abuse! M Give me the brave, child-loving -Jew, M The full-sexed Jew of either sex, M Who loves, brings forth and nothing recks Of care or cost, as Christians do ; Dulled souls who will not hear or see ilBH How Christ once raised His lowly head H And, as rebuking, gently said H The while Ho took them tenderly, fl "Let little children come to Me." I H Hear me this prophecy and heed : , H Except we cleanse us kirk or creed, H Except we wash us word and deed H The Jew shall rule us, reign the Jew, H And just because the Jew is true, ' H Is true to nature, true to truth ; I H Is clean, is chaste, as truthful Ruth H Who bore us David Solomon ( H The Babe, that far, first Christmas dawn. !H From the Oakland Herald. j H |
