Explore "The Earth" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I. To build a house, with love for architect, / Ranks first and foremost in the joys of life. / And in a tiny cabin, shaped for two, / The space for happiness is just as great / As in a palace. What a world were this / If each soul born received a plot of ground; / A little plot, whereon a home might rise, / And beauteous green things grow! / We give the dead, / The idle vagrant dead, the Potter's Field; / Yet to the living not one inch of soil. / Nay, we take from them soil, and sun, and air, / To fashion slums and hell-holes for the race. / And to our poor we say, ‘Go starve and die / As beggars die; so gain your heritage.'
II. That was a most uncanny dream; I thought the wraiths of those / Long buried in the Potter's Field, in shredded shrouds arose; / They said, ‘Against the will of God / We have usurped the fertile sod, / Now will we make it yield.'