A Night with Fate

edeviled by grin Satanic,
Hiding human heart beats,
Fate walked in early morning,
With me, through city streets.

Toilers and grinders were plodding
Away to their daily strife,
With the sullen faces of oxen,
To earn the bread of life.

Up through the smoke of a century
A patch of blue I saw,
But the eyes of the slave looked downward,
The winter wind was raw.

Fate grinned as he hailed a toiler,
Swinging along the way,
“Ho Richard! How like you living?
Was’t better in ancient day?”

Instantly the man’s form straightened,
Eyes flashed with a kingly flame–
He stood there a ruler in triumph,
The Richard of England’s fame.

Fate beckoned me ever onward,
We entered the factory door
And there in a hundred faces
The ghastly tale read o’er.

Men sang, but there’s singing and singing
And the song that covers a woe
Were better shorn of beginning
In the centuries long ago.

In the slums of the throbbing city
We know men live and die:
Fate called, I hurried onward
For I heard a woman’s cry.

In clutch of the mob, an outcast
Whose hair was streaming wide–
Sobs shook her naked bosom,
But Fate walked by her side.

“Ho, ho, my royal lady!
How sets the beggar’s gown?
How like you this old earth again?
And where has gone thy crown?”

As clouds before a winter’s gale
Went cries to welcome death–
The beggar rose with royal mien,
She was Elizabeth.

Fate grinned no more, but in his face
Shone pity and sweet sorrow,
A tear for all the human race
Who live again tomorrow.

I hurried as he beckoned oft
And paused beside the tide:
He spoke and pointed to the sun–
“Life has a happier side.”