Page:Poems Kennedy.djvu/125

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MME. CATHERINE BRESHKOVSKAYA

("Grandmother of the Russian Revolution" has spent 50 of her 74 years in prison)

YOU think—
With needles glancing through the yarn
Or stitching endlessly a seam
    In tender loyalty,
Or that you bought a bond to help
Let loose the nation's golden stream—
You think with these that you have done
    Your "bit" for Liberty?

Then what of her—Breshkovskaya—
That broken, white-haired Russian dame
    Who, half a century
Groveled in dungeons of her land
Because for Russia she dared claim,
From scourging hand and iron heel,
    That same sweet Liberty?

Not hers to knit nor hers to sew
For those who guarded Russia's path
    To make her people free.
Her youth went out in prison blight,
Her soul was bruised with royal wrath,
The suns and stars of fifty years
    She did not see.

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