THE JEWISH CONSCRIPT - Samuel Taylor Coleridge Poems

 
 

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THE JEWISH CONSCRIPT


They have dressed me up in a soldier’s dress,
    With a rifle in my hand,
And have sent me bravely forth to shoot
    My own in a foreign land.

Oh, many shall die for their fields and homes,
    And many in conquest wild,
But I shall die for the fatherland
    That murdered my little child.

How many hundreds of years ago --
    The nations wax and cease! --
Did the God of our fathers doom us to bear
    The flaming message of peace!

We are the mock and the sport of time!
    Yet why should I complain! --
For a Jew that they hung on the bloody cross,
    He also died in vain.