Poems (Kennedy)/Madame Catherine Breshkovskaya

by Sara Beaumont Kennedy

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.

And yet her courage never failed.
When revolution broke her bars
    And she was free,
She came forth in the glorious light
And showed her hands, all seamed with scars,
And turned her face up to the stars
And cried: "I fed, through all the years,
    On hope of Liberty!"

She did her "bit" with bar and bolt,
Mayhap with lash, and yet—and yet
    The world her smile may see!
She wakes us up to higher things,
She shows us heights our hearts forget,
She shames us into sacrifice
    For home and Liberty!