Poems (Kennedy)/Wild Oats
WILD OATS
"AH, let them alone—"'tis the age-old cry— Boys will ever be boys, you know;They must plow the world to the rim of youth, Their fields of wild oats they must sow,Let them alone—they are immune To leash of straight-laced moral code.BOYS WILL BE BOYS; they measure life By laws that license has bestowed."
This is the hectic creed of the years, The damning lie that parents preachTo ease their conscience of the blame For higher goals they failed to reach.Immune, these sowers of wild-oat tares? There's never a single garnered fieldWhere sickles of sorrow have cut their swarths But tells its tale of a misery yield.
Go, look in the wards where the maniacs rave, Their brain cells brimmed with liquid fireThrough mad misrule of uncurbed wills Or the blight of a foul desire.And count, if you can, the blameless hosts— The waifs unfathered and unnamed—Who, under the light of God's blue sky, Must live their cheated lives ashamed.
And, ah! the "drunks" and the derelicts Lined day by day at the judge's bar,And the man who limps on a shriveled limb— A horrible, visible moral scar!And the frightened girl with her shame revealed Leaping down where the moonbeams quiver,Her epitaph but the scornful line: "A floater dragged from the river."
And the men hard-lipped and filled with fear As they slip from the doctor's door.Hiding his verdict of loathsome taint— (Oh, the wives who must pay THAT score!) Hating the secret noisomeness That saps with its creeping ills.Hating the wild oats that they sowed In the lustful pace that kills.
These are the boys who "would be boys," Not held to straight laced moral code,The boys who measured their golden youth By laws that license had bestowed.They tread the trail where the serpent crawled And are slimed with its vicious stain,They plow their oats with the plow of sin And reap with the sickle of pain.
L'Envoi—And the gleaners who come in the after years— Generations born under that spell?In taint of body and smirch of soul They garner an endless hell!