A favorite poem - what do you think it means?

The Man with the Hoe
by Edwin Markham

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 the aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned, and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Powers that made the world.
A protest that is also a 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 all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings —
With those who shaped him to the thing he is —
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world.
After the silence of the centuries?

Do you think this poem has any relevance now?

An end of August poem

Van Gogh's Starry Night

Star Fishing

Today I want to tell you about variable stars.

They intrigue me because they change.

They change in brightness.

Some repeat cycles with almost clocklike precision

others change irregularly.

Some require only hours or days

to return to their starting brightness.

Others require years to change.

Yet, whether they change imperceptibly or violently

all variable stars change.

The most spectacular variable is the Nova.

It can get up to 200,000 times brighter than the Sun.

But, alas, it is temporary.

It periodically blows off a tiny percent of the Sun’s mass

at speeds up to 600 miles a second

until it loses too much mass to continue.

Whereas Supernovas brighten up to 10 billion times

the Sun’s brightness for a few days

and then fade away forever.

One more thing.

Variable stars change their brightness by pulsating

ever expanding and contracting

like a balloon,

They repeat their brightness cycles

from one day to hundreds of days

and are hundreds of times more luminous

than the Sun.

Well, that’s it.

Now go out into your yard

lean back in your recliner

gaze up into that black starry sky

and see if you can find your own variable star

amidst the 8000 stars visible to the naked eye.

See if you can catch its luminosity.

Surely you can.

Surely you can.