How Would You? by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Half of our misery, half our pain, / Half the dark background of our self-reproach, / Is thought of how the world has sinned before. / We, being one, one with all life, we feel / The misdemeanors of uncounted time; / We suffer in the foolishness and sins / Of races just behind us,-burn with shame / At their gross ignorance and murderous deeds; / We suffer back of them in the long years / Of squalid struggling savagery of beasts,- / Beasts human and subhuman; back of them / In helpless creatures eaten, hunted, torn; / In submerged forests dying in the slime; / And even back of that in endless years / Of hot convulsions of dismembered lands, / And slow constricting centuries of cold. / So in our own lives, even to this day, / We carry in the chambers of the mind / The tale of errors, failures, and misdeeds / That we call sins, of all our early lives. / And the recurrent consciousness of this / We call remorse. The unrelenting gauge, / Now measuring past error,-this is shame. / And in our feverish overconsciousness, / A retroactive and preactive sense,- / Fired with our self-made theories of sin,- / We suffer, suffer, suffer-half alive, / And half with the dead scars of suffering.

Friends, how would you, perhaps, have made the world? / Would you have balanced the great forces so / Their interaction would have bred no shock? / No cosmic throes of newborn continents, / No eras of the earth-encircling rain,- / Uncounted scalding tears that fell and fell / On molten worlds that hotly dashed them back / In storms of fierce repudiated steam? / Would you have made earth's gems without the fire, / Without the water, and without the weight / Of crushing cubic miles of huddled rock? / Would you have made one kind of plant to reign / In all the earth, growing mast high, and then / Keep it undying so, and end of plants? / Would you have made one kind of animal / To live on air and spare the tender grass, / And stop him, somehow, when he grew so thick / That even air fell short. Or would you have / All plants and animals, and make them change / By some metempsychosis not called death? / For, having them, you have to have them change, / For growth is change, and life is growth; and change / Implies-in this world-what we miscall pain.