(To settings by Kurt Weill, Friedrich Holländer, et al.)
I
GOLD
Below us, in the shafted ground,
Set charges shatter into sound,
And over us, in shattered light,
Thunder prolongs the dynamite.
If we, on balconies of glass,
Can, unmoved, feel those tremors pass,
Can feel no shame for ton on ton
Of gold so obdurately won,
Neither need they who in dark earth
Exact what has for them no worth
Remember how in darkened skies
The brilliant veins unbidden rise.
II
BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON
We serve, by tribute of a tongue not ours,
A Mammon which ignores us, toward whose greed
We raise blind walls, and from whose very towers
We search in vain the land that they succeed:
A land in which the gentle thrust of rain
Bears up the sky of summer, and where dust,
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