| I WAS the Sunday school superintendent, | |
| The dummy president of the wagon works | |
| And the canning factory, | |
| Acting for Thomas Rhodes and the banking clique; | |
| My son the cashier of the bank, | 5 |
| Wedded to Rhodes’ daughter, | |
| My week days spent in making money, | |
| My Sundays at church and in prayer. | |
| In everything a cog in the wheel of things-as-they-are: | |
| Of money, master and man, made white | 10 |
| With the paint of the Christian creed. | |
| And then: | |
| The bank collapsed. I stood and looked at the wrecked machine— | |
| The wheels with blow-holes stopped with putty and painted; | |
| The rotten bolts, the broken rods; | 15 |
| And only the hopper for souls fit to be used again | |
| In a new devourer of life, when newspapers, judges and money-magicians | |
| Build over again. | |
| I was stripped to the bone, but I lay in the Rock of Ages, | |
| Seeing now through the game, no longer a dupe, | 20 |
| And knowing “the upright shall dwell in the land | |
| But the years of the wicked shall be shortened.” | |
| Then suddenly, Dr. Meyers discovered | |
| A cancer in my liver. | |
| I was not, after all, the particular care of God! | 25 |
| Why, even thus standing on a peak | |
| Above the mists through which I had climbed, | |
| And ready for larger life in the world, | |
| Eternal forces | |
| Moved me on with a push. | 30 |
