| Great verses above from everyone - I havn't read a bad one yet - although I am a bit of a Guy Fawkes sympathizer, but not of Mao.
I see there's a spiritual thread running in some places so here's an addition from a Church of England Minister, R. S. Thomas: The Country Clergy
I see them working in old rectories
By the sun's light, by candlelight,
Venerable men, their black cloth
A little dusty, a little green
With holy mildew. And yet their skulls,
Ripening over so many prayers,
Toppled into the same grave
With oafs and yokels. They left no books,
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes; rather they wrote
On men's hearts and in the minds
Of young children sublime words
Too soon forgotten. God in his time
Or out of time will correct this.
and one of his more brooding samples.... The Dark Well
They see you as they see you,
A poor farmer with no name,
Ploughing cloudward, sowing the wind
With squalls of gulls at the day's end.
To me you are Prytherch, the man
Who more than all directed my slow
Charity where there was need.
There are two hungers, hunger for bread
And hunger of the uncouth soul
For the light's grace. I have seen both,
And chosen for an indulgent world's
Ear the story of one whose hands
Have bruised themselves on the locked doors
Of life; whose heart, fuller than mine
Of gulped tears, is the dark well
From which to draw, drop after drop,
The terrible poetry of his kind.
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