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Page:Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse by Paul Selver.djvu/248

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224
PETR BEZRUČ

How if one day I should fling my accursed lamp into the pit,
And stiffen my bended neck,
Clench my left hand and stride forth and onward,
And in a sweeping curve from the earth to the skyline upwards
Should upraise my hammer and my flashing eyes,
Yonder beneath God's sunshine!

2. THE HIDEOUS SPECTRE.

Ugh. . . 'tis a hideous phantom!
So say the justices of the golden city,
So says the sage leader of the people,
Patriot ladies shake their dainty heads,
So says Rothschild and Gutman, Count Laryš and Vlček,
And his Lordship Marquis Géro,—
When from the throng of the seventy thousand
I rose up aloft. So did they smite me with a whip!
Like to the Vitkovice furnaces blazed my single eye,
A bloodstained gown fluttered from my shoulders,
Upon one I bore the German school,
Upon the other I bore the Polish church,
In my right hand the heavy hammer I bore
(My left was struck off by a boulder of coal,
My eye was scorched out by the plaze of a flame)