"AM I TO BE BLAMED?

"

They're chasing me, they're chasing, no they must not catch me, I have enough
money now, yes enough for my starving mother and brothers.

Please let me go, let me go home before you imprisoned me. Very well, officers?
take me to your headquarters. Good morning captain! no captain, you are
mistaken, I was once a good girl, just like the rest of you here. Just like any of
your daughters. But time was, when I was reared in slums. But we lived honestly,
we lived honestly in life. My, father, mother, brothers, sisters and I. But then,
poverty enters the portals of our home. My father became jobless, my mother got
ill. The small savings that my mother had kept for our expenses were spent. All
for our daily needs and her needed medicine.

One night, my father went out, telling us that he would come back in a few
minutes with plenty of foods and money, but that was the last time I saw him. He
went with another woman. If only I could lay my hands on his neck I would wring
it without pain until he breaths no more. If you were in my place, you'll do it, won't
you Captain? What? you won't still believe in me?. Come and I'll show you a
dilapidated shanty by a railroad.

Mother, mother I'm home, mother? mother?!. There Captain, see my dead
mother. Captain? there are tears in your eyes? now pack this stolen money and
return it to the owner. What good would this do to my mother now? she's already
gone! Do you hear me? she's already gone. Am I to be blamed for the things I
have done?

"JUVENILE DELINQUENT"

Am I a juvenile delinquent? I'm a teenager, I'm young, young at heart in mind. In

this position, I'm carefree, I enjoy doing nothing but to drink the wine of pleasure.
I seldom go to school, nobody cares!. But instead you can see me roaming
around. Standing at the nearby canto (street). Or else standing beside a jukebox
stand playing the nerve tickling bugaloo.Those are the reasons, why people, you
branded me delinquent, a juvenile delinquent.
My parents ignored me, my teachers sneered at me and my friends, they
neglected me. One night I asked my mother to teach me how to appreciate the
values in life. Would you care what she told me? "Stop bothering me! Can't you
see? I had to dress up for my mahjong session, some other time my child". I
turned to my father to console me, but, what a wonderful thing he told me. "Child,
here's 500 bucks, get it and enjou yourself, go and ask your teachers that
question".

And in school, I heard nothing but the echoes of the voices of my teachers
torturing me with these words. "Why waste your time in studying, you can't even
divide 100 by 5! Go home and plant sweet potatoes".

I may have the looks of Audrey Hepburn, the calmly voice of Nathalie Cole. But
that's not what you can see in me. Here's a young girl who needs counsel to
enlighten her way and guidance to strenghten her life into contentment.

Honorable judge, friends and teachers...is this the girl whom you commented a
juvenile delinquent?

THE MAN WITH THE HOE

by: Edwin Markham (1852-1940)

BOWED by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power.
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More fraught with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!

Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?