“We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists ‘of conspiring to teach to do,’ but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial
capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York,”*

Or anywhere else for that matter, but we are too lazy
in our comfortable (no working out one’s salvation
with fear and trembling —
done anything for the poor, the prisoner suffering?)
individual salvation in Jesus Christ,
anti-biblical, falsely-scriptural lazy, hazy, crazy
days of summer kind of white, evangelical religion
where all I have to do is accept
and win the capitalistic bet
to go to heaven — hell to forget
except that hell is the cell
of my selfishness and
buying into the system,
“which breeds such suffering
in the whited sepulcher of” my
complacent, privileged, yet angry,
resentful, hateful, fearful, lily-white,
anthracitic, arthritic lump of a
hard-hearted heart.

*Dorothy Day,
The Catholic Worker, September 1956, 6, 7.