| |
| “BEHOLD, as I sit here, alone and forlorn, | |
| Very often I wish I had never been born, | |
| For of all of my travail, my sorrow and pain, | |
| Oh, can ye, O nations, discover my gain? | |
| Ye tread on my beard and ye spit in my face, | 5 |
| And ye clothe me in chains and the badge of disgrace. | |
| And ye come and advise me to lose myself quite, | |
| And assimilate with the dark shadows of night. | |
| As well to exhort the Gulf Stream to be mixed | |
| With the cold, icy ocean wherein it is fixed; | 10 |
| Or advise in the heavens the great Milky Way | |
| To be lost in the stars that most everywhere lay. | |
| |
| “Oh, no! If true justice still lingers on earth | |
| You will give me the home that was mine from my birth. | |
| Return me the land where I battled and fought, | 15 |
| The land every inch of which dearly I bought, | |
| Very dearly I bought with the blood of my veins, | |
| Where I struggled for freedom and shatter’d my chains; | |
| Where I strove with and conquer’d wild races of men, | |
| Gog-Magog, the giants, I drove from their den; | 20 |
| Where I worshipped my God and expounded His law, | |
| And where first the great light of His Wisdom I saw. | |
| |
| “In that land were my fathers for ages interred, | |
| And the prophets and sages who lived by the Word, | |
| There the graves of my martyrs abound on the plains, | 25 |
| And the roads are yet strewn with my children’s remains! | |
| Every stone in that land is a tear from my eye, | |
| In its mountains still lingers the breath of my sigh. | |
| In its forests my wailing can yet be discerned,— | |
| Lives a soul who would say thus: ‘I am not concerned?’ | 30 |
| Then return me my country! If justice yet dwell | |
| Here on earth, O return me, return my Beth-el!” | |
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