3148 lines
101 KiB
Plaintext
3148 lines
101 KiB
Plaintext
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CHICAGO POEMS, by CARL SANDBURG.
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Digitized by Cardinalis Etext Press, C.E.K.
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Posted to Wiretap in June 1993, as chicago.txt.
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This text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN.
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CHICAGO POEMS
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By
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CARL SANDBURG
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NEW YORK
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HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
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COPYRIGHT, 1916
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BY
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HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
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To
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MY WIFE AND PAL
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LILLIAN STEICHEN SANDBURG
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PREFATORY NOTE
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Some of these writings were first printed in Poetry: A
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Magazine of Verse, Chicago. Permission to reprint is by courtesy of
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that publication. The writer wishes to thank Harriet Monroe and
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Alice Corbin Henderson, editors of Poetry, and William Marion
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Reedy, editor of Reedy's Mirror, St. Louis, whose services have
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heightened what values of human address herein hold good.
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CONTENTS
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CHICAGO POEMS
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Chicago. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Sketch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Masses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Lost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Harbor . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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They Will Say. . . . . . . . . . . .
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Mill-Doors . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Halsted Street Car . . . . . . . . .
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Clark Street Bridge. . . . . . . . .
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Passers-by . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Walking Man of Rodin . . . . . .
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Subway . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Shovel Man . . . . . . . . . . .
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A Teamster's Farewell. . . . . . . .
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Fish Crier . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Picnic Boat. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Happiness. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Muckers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Blacklisted. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Graceland. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Child of the Romans. . . . . . . . .
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The Right to Grief . . . . . . . . .
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Mag. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Onion Days . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Population Drifts. . . . . . . . . .
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Cripple. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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A Fence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Anna Imroth. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Working Girls. . . . . . . . . . . .
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Mamie. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Personality. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Cumulatives. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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To Certain Journeymen. . . . . . . .
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Chamfort . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Limited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Has-Been . . . . . . . . . . . .
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In a Back Alley. . . . . . . . . . .
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A Coin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Dynamiter. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Ice Handler. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Jack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Fellow Citizens. . . . . . . . . . .
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Nigger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Two Neighbors. . . . . . . . . . . .
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Style. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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To Beachey--1912 . . . . . . . . . .
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Under a Hat Rim. . . . . . . . . . .
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In a Breath. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Bath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Bronzes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Dunes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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On the Way . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Ready to Kill. . . . . . . . . . . .
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To a Contemporary Bunkshooter. . . .
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Skyscraper . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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HANDFULS
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Fog. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Pool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Jan Kubelik. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Choose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Crimson. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Whitelight . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Flux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Kin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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White Shoulders. . . . . . . . . . .
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Losses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Troths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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WAR POEMS (1914-1915)
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Killers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Among the Red Guns . . . . . . . . .
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Iron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Murmurings in a Field Hospital . . .
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Statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Fight. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Buttons. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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And They Obey. . . . . . . . . . . .
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Jaws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Salvage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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THE ROAD AND THE END
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The Road and the End . . . . . . . .
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Choices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Graves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Aztec Mask . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Momus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Answer . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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To a Dead Man. . . . . . . . . . . .
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Under. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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A Sphinx . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Who Am I?. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Our Prayer of Thanks . . . . . . . .
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FOGS AND FIRES
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At a Window. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Under the Harvest Moon . . . . . . .
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The Great Hunt . . . . . . . . . . .
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Monotone . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Joy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Shirt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Aztec. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Two. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Back Yard. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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On the Breakwater. . . . . . . . . .
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Mask . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Pearl Fog. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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I Sang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Follies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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June . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard . .
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Hydrangeas . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Theme in Yellow. . . . . . . . . . .
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Between Two Hills. . . . . . . . . .
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Last Answers . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Window . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Young Sea. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Bones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Pals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Child. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Poppies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Child Moon . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Margaret . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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SHADOWS
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Poems Done on a Late Night Car. . . .
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It Is Much. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Trafficker. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Harrison Street Court . . . . . . . .
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Soiled Dove . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Jungheimer's. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Gone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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OTHER DAYS (1900-1910)
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Dreams in the Dusk. . . . . . . . . .
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Docks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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All Day Long. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Waiting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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From the Shore. . . . . . . . . . . .
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Uplands in May. . . . . . . . . . . .
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A Dream Girl. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Plowboy . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Broadway. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Old Woman . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Noon Hour . . . . . . . . . . . .
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'Boes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Under a Telephone Pole. . . . . . . .
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I Am the People, the Mob. . . . . . .
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Government. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Letters to Dead Imagists. . . . . . .
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Sheep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Red Son . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Mist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Junk Man. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Silver Nails. . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Gypsy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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CHICAGO POEMS
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CHICAGO
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HOG Butcher for the World,
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Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
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Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
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Stormy, husky, brawling,
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City of the Big Shoulders:
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They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
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have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
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luring the farm boys.
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And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
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is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
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kill again.
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And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
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faces of women and children I have seen the marks
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of wanton hunger.
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And having answered so I turn once more to those who
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sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
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and say to them:
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Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
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so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
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Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
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job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
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little soft cities;
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Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
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as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
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Bareheaded,
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Shoveling,
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Wrecking,
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Planning,
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Building, breaking, rebuilding,
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Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
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white teeth,
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Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
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man laughs,
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Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
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never lost a battle,
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Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
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and under his ribs the heart of the people,
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Laughing!
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Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
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Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
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Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
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Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
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SKETCH
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THE shadows of the ships
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Rock on the crest
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In the low blue lustre
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Of the tardy and the soft inrolling tide.
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A long brown bar at the dip of the sky
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Puts an arm of sand in the span of salt.
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The lucid and endless wrinkles
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Draw in, lapse and withdraw.
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Wavelets crumble and white spent bubbles
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Wash on the floor of the beach.
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Rocking on the crest
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In the low blue lustre
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Are the shadows of the ships.
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MASSES
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AMONG the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and
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red crag and was amazed;
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On the beach where the long push under the endless tide
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maneuvers, I stood silent;
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Under the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant
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over the horizon's grass, I was full of thoughts.
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Great men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers,
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mothers lifting their children--these all I
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touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them.
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And then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions
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of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than
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crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the
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darkness of night--and all broken, humble ruins of nations.
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LOST
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DESOLATE and lone
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All night long on the lake
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Where fog trails and mist creeps,
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The whistle of a boat
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Calls and cries unendingly,
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Like some lost child
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In tears and trouble
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Hunting the harbor's breast
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And the harbor's eyes.
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THE HARBOR
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PASSING through huddled and ugly walls
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By doorways where women
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Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
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Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
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Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
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I came sudden, at the city's edge,
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On a blue burst of lake,
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Long lake waves breaking under the sun
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On a spray-flung curve of shore;
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And a fluttering storm of gulls,
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Masses of great gray wings
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And flying white bellies
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Veering and wheeling free in the open.
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THEY WILL SAY
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OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
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You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
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And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
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And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
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To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
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To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
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For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.
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MILL-DOORS
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YOU never come back.
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I say good-by when I see you going in the doors,
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The hopeless open doors that call and wait
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And take you then for--how many cents a day?
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How many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers?
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I say good-by because I know they tap your wrists,
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In the dark, in the silence, day by day,
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And all the blood of you drop by drop,
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And you are old before you are young.
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You never come back.
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HALSTED STREET CAR
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COME you, cartoonists,
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Hang on a strap with me here
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At seven o'clock in the morning
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On a Halsted street car.
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Take your pencils
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And draw these faces.
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Try with your pencils for these crooked faces,
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That pig-sticker in one corner--his mouth--
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That overall factory girl--her loose cheeks.
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Find for your pencils
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A way to mark your memory
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Of tired empty faces.
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After their night's sleep,
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In the moist dawn
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And cool daybreak,
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Faces
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Tired of wishes,
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Empty of dreams.
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CLARK STREET BRIDGE
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DUST of the feet
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And dust of the wheels,
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Wagons and people going,
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All day feet and wheels.
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Now. . .
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. . Only stars and mist
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A lonely policeman,
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Two cabaret dancers,
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Stars and mist again,
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No more feet or wheels,
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No more dust and wagons.
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Voices of dollars
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And drops of blood
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. . . . .
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Voices of broken hearts,
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. . Voices singing, singing,
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. . Silver voices, singing,
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Softer than the stars,
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Softer than the mist.
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PASSERS-BY
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PASSERS-BY,
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Out of your many faces
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Flash memories to me
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Now at the day end
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Away from the sidewalks
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Where your shoe soles traveled
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And your voices rose and blent
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To form the city's afternoon roar
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Hindering an old silence.
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Passers-by,
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I remember lean ones among you,
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Throats in the clutch of a hope,
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Lips written over with strivings,
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Mouths that kiss only for love.
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Records of great wishes slept with,
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Held long
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And prayed and toiled for. .
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Yes,
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Written on
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Your mouths
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And your throats
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I read them
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When you passed by.
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THE WALKING MAN OF RODIN
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LEGS hold a torso away from the earth.
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And a regular high poem of legs is here.
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Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungs
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Out of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hear
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And arms have a chance to hammer and shoot and run motors.
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You make us
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Proud of our legs, old man.
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And you left off the head here,
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The skull found always crumbling neighbor of the ankles.
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SUBWAY
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DOWN between the walls of shadow
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Where the iron laws insist,
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The hunger voices mock.
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The worn wayfaring men
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With the hunched and humble shoulders,
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Throw their laughter into toil.
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THE SHOVEL MAN
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ON the street
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Slung on his shoulder is a handle half way across,
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Tied in a big knot on the scoop of cast iron
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Are the overalls faded from sun and rain in the ditches;
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Spatter of dry clay sticking yellow on his left sleeve
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And a flimsy shirt open at the throat,
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I know him for a shovel man,
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A dago working for a dollar six bits a day
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And a dark-eyed woman in the old country dreams of
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him for one of the world's ready men with a pair
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of fresh lips and a kiss better than all the wild
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grapes that ever grew in Tuscany.
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A TEAMSTER'S FAREWELL
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Sobs En Route to a Penitentiary
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GOOD-BY now to the streets and the clash of wheels and
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locking hubs,
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The sun coming on the brass buckles and harness knobs.
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The muscles of the horses sliding under their heavy
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haunches,
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Good-by now to the traffic policeman and his whistle,
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The smash of the iron hoof on the stones,
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All the crazy wonderful slamming roar of the street--
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O God, there's noises I'm going to be hungry for.
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FISH CRIER
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I KNOW a Jew fish crier down on Maxwell Street with a
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voice like a north wind blowing over corn stubble
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in January.
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He dangles herring before prospective customers evincing
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a joy identical with that of Pavlowa dancing.
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His face is that of a man terribly glad to be selling fish,
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terribly glad that God made fish, and customers to
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whom he may call his wares, from a pushcart.
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PICNIC BOAT
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SUNDAY night and the park policemen tell each other it
|
|
is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan.
|
|
A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach
|
|
farms of Saugatuck.
|
|
Hundreds of electric bulbs break the night's darkness, a
|
|
flock of red and yellow birds with wings at a standstill.
|
|
Running along the deck railings are festoons and leaping
|
|
in curves are loops of light from prow and stern
|
|
to the tall smokestacks.
|
|
Over the hoarse crunch of waves at my pier comes a
|
|
hoarse answer in the rhythmic oompa of the brasses
|
|
playing a Polish folk-song for the home-comers.
|
|
|
|
HAPPINESS
|
|
|
|
I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
|
|
me what is happiness.
|
|
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
|
|
thousands of men.
|
|
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
|
|
I was trying to fool with them
|
|
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
|
|
the Desplaines river
|
|
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
|
|
their women and children and a keg of beer and an
|
|
accordion.
|
|
|
|
MUCKERS
|
|
|
|
TWENTY men stand watching the muckers.
|
|
Stabbing the sides of the ditch
|
|
Where clay gleams yellow,
|
|
Driving the blades of their shovels
|
|
Deeper and deeper for the new gas mains
|
|
Wiping sweat off their faces
|
|
With red bandanas
|
|
The muckers work on . . pausing . . to pull
|
|
Their boots out of suckholes where they slosh.
|
|
|
|
Of the twenty looking on
|
|
Ten murmer, "O, its a hell of a job,"
|
|
Ten others, "Jesus, I wish I had the job."
|
|
|
|
BLACKLISTED
|
|
|
|
WHY shall I keep the old name?
|
|
What is a name anywhere anyway?
|
|
A name is a cheap thing all fathers and mothers leave
|
|
each child:
|
|
A job is a job and I want to live, so
|
|
Why does God Almighty or anybody else care whether
|
|
I take a new name to go by?
|
|
|
|
GRACELAND
|
|
|
|
TOMB of a millionaire,
|
|
A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,
|
|
Place of the dead where they spend every year
|
|
The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars
|
|
For upkeep and flowers
|
|
To keep fresh the memory of the dead.
|
|
The merchant prince gone to dust
|
|
Commanded in his written will
|
|
Over the signed name of his last testament
|
|
Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside
|
|
For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,
|
|
For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance
|
|
Around his last long home.
|
|
|
|
(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night.
|
|
In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables
|
|
Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose
|
|
silver dollars in their pockets.
|
|
In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or
|
|
dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week wages
|
|
And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she
|
|
is reckless about God and the newspapers and the
|
|
police, the talk of her home town or the name
|
|
people call her.)
|
|
|
|
CHILD OF THE ROMANS
|
|
|
|
THE dago shovelman sits by the railroad track
|
|
Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna.
|
|
A train whirls by, and men and women at tables
|
|
Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils,
|
|
Eat steaks running with brown gravy,
|
|
Strawberries and cream, eclaires and coffee.
|
|
The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna,
|
|
Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy,
|
|
And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day's work
|
|
Keeping the road-bed so the roses and jonquils
|
|
Shake hardly at all in the cut glass vases
|
|
Standing slender on the tables in the dining cars.
|
|
|
|
THE RIGHT TO GRIEF
|
|
|
|
To Certain Poets About to Die
|
|
|
|
TAKE your fill of intimate remorse, perfumed sorrow,
|
|
Over the dead child of a millionaire,
|
|
And the pity of Death refusing any check on the bank
|
|
Which the millionaire might order his secretary to
|
|
scratch off
|
|
And get cashed.
|
|
|
|
Very well,
|
|
You for your grief and I for mine.
|
|
Let me have a sorrow my own if I want to.
|
|
|
|
I shall cry over the dead child of a stockyards hunky.
|
|
His job is sweeping blood off the floor.
|
|
He gets a dollar seventy cents a day when he works
|
|
And it's many tubs of blood he shoves out with a broom
|
|
day by day.
|
|
|
|
Now his three year old daughter
|
|
Is in a white coffin that cost him a week's wages.
|
|
Every Saturday night he will pay the undertaker fifty
|
|
cents till the debt is wiped out.
|
|
|
|
The hunky and his wife and the kids
|
|
Cry over the pinched face almost at peace in the white box.
|
|
|
|
They remember it was scrawny and ran up high doctor bills.
|
|
They are glad it is gone for the rest of the family now
|
|
will have more to eat and wear.
|
|
|
|
Yet before the majesty of Death they cry around the coffin
|
|
And wipe their eyes with red bandanas and sob when
|
|
the priest says, "God have mercy on us all."
|
|
|
|
I have a right to feel my throat choke about this.
|
|
You take your grief and I mine--see?
|
|
To-morrow there is no funeral and the hunky goes back
|
|
to his job sweeping blood off the floor at a dollar
|
|
seventy cents a day.
|
|
All he does all day long is keep on shoving hog blood
|
|
ahead of him with a broom
|
|
|
|
MAG
|
|
|
|
I WISH to God I never saw you, Mag.
|
|
I wish you never quit your job and came along with me.
|
|
I wish we never bought a license and a white dress
|
|
For you to get married in the day we ran off to a minister
|
|
And told him we would love each other and take care of
|
|
each other
|
|
Always and always long as the sun and the rain lasts anywhere.
|
|
Yes, I'm wishing now you lived somewhere away from here
|
|
And I was a bum on the bumpers a thousand miles away
|
|
dead broke.
|
|
I wish the kids had never come
|
|
And rent and coal and clothes to pay for
|
|
And a grocery man calling for cash,
|
|
Every day cash for beans and prunes.
|
|
I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
|
|
I wish to God the kids had never come.
|
|
|
|
ONION DAYS
|
|
|
|
MRS. GABRIELLE GIOVANNITTI comes along Peoria Street
|
|
every morning at nine o'clock
|
|
With kindling wood piled on top of her head, her eyes
|
|
looking straight ahead to find the way for her old feet.
|
|
Her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti, whose
|
|
husband was killed in a tunnel explosion through
|
|
the negligence of a fellow-servant,
|
|
Works ten hours a day, sometimes twelve, picking onions
|
|
for Jasper on the Bowmanville road.
|
|
She takes a street car at half-past five in the morning,
|
|
Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti does,
|
|
And gets back from Jasper's with cash for her day's
|
|
work, between nine and ten o'clock at night.
|
|
Last week she got eight cents a box, Mrs. Pietro
|
|
Giovannitti, picking onions for Jasper,
|
|
But this week Jasper dropped the pay to six cents a
|
|
box because so many women and girls were answering
|
|
the ads in the Daily News.
|
|
Jasper belongs to an Episcopal church in Ravenswood
|
|
and on certain Sundays
|
|
He enjoys chanting the Nicene creed with his daughters
|
|
on each side of him joining their voices with his.
|
|
If the preacher repeats old sermons of a Sunday, Jasper's
|
|
mind wanders to his 700-acre farm and how he
|
|
can make it produce more efficiently
|
|
And sometimes he speculates on whether he could word
|
|
an ad in the Daily News so it would bring more
|
|
women and girls out to his farm and reduce operating
|
|
costs.
|
|
Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti is far from desperate about life;
|
|
her joy is in a child she knows will arrive to her in
|
|
three months.
|
|
And now while these are the pictures for today there are
|
|
other pictures of the Giovannitti people I could give
|
|
you for to-morrow,
|
|
And how some of them go to the county agent on winter
|
|
mornings with their baskets for beans and cornmeal
|
|
and molasses.
|
|
I listen to fellows saying here's good stuff for a novel or
|
|
it might be worked up into a good play.
|
|
I say there's no dramatist living can put old Mrs.
|
|
Gabrielle Giovannitti into a play with that kindling
|
|
wood piled on top of her head coming along Peoria
|
|
Street nine o'clock in the morning.
|
|
|
|
POPULATION DRIFTS
|
|
|
|
NEW-MOWN hay smell and wind of the plain made her
|
|
a woman whose ribs had the power of the hills in
|
|
them and her hands were tough for work and there
|
|
was passion for life in her womb.
|
|
She and her man crossed the ocean and the years that
|
|
marked their faces saw them haggling with landlords
|
|
and grocers while six children played on the stones
|
|
and prowled in the garbage cans.
|
|
One child coughed its lungs away, two more have adenoids
|
|
and can neither talk nor run like their mother,
|
|
one is in jail, two have jobs in a box factory
|
|
And as they fold the pasteboard, they wonder what the
|
|
wishing is and the wistful glory in them that flutters
|
|
faintly when the glimmer of spring comes on
|
|
the air or the green of summer turns brown:
|
|
They do not know it is the new-mown hay smell calling
|
|
and the wind of the plain praying for them to come
|
|
back and take hold of life again with tough hands
|
|
and with passion.
|
|
|
|
CRIPPLE
|
|
|
|
ONCE when I saw a cripple
|
|
Gasping slowly his last days with the white plague,
|
|
Looking from hollow eyes, calling for air,
|
|
Desperately gesturing with wasted hands
|
|
In the dark and dust of a house down in a slum,
|
|
I said to myself
|
|
I would rather have been a tall sunflower
|
|
Living in a country garden
|
|
Lifting a golden-brown face to the summer,
|
|
Rain-washed and dew-misted,
|
|
Mixed with the poppies and ranking hollyhocks,
|
|
And wonderingly watching night after night
|
|
The clear silent processionals of stars.
|
|
|
|
A FENCE
|
|
|
|
Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the
|
|
workmen are beginning the fence.
|
|
The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that
|
|
can stab the life out of any man who falls on them.
|
|
As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble
|
|
and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering
|
|
children looking for a place to play.
|
|
Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go
|
|
nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow.
|
|
|
|
ANNA IMROTH
|
|
|
|
CROSS the hands over the breast here--so.
|
|
Straighten the legs a little more--so.
|
|
And call for the wagon to come and take her home.
|
|
Her mother will cry some and so will her sisters and
|
|
brothers.
|
|
But all of the others got down and they are safe and
|
|
this is the only one of the factory girls who
|
|
wasn't lucky in making the jump when the fire broke.
|
|
It is the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes.
|
|
|
|
WORKING GIRLS
|
|
|
|
THE working girls in the morning are going to work--
|
|
long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores
|
|
and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped
|
|
lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.
|
|
Each morning as I move through this river of young-
|
|
woman life I feel a wonder about where it is all
|
|
going, so many with a peach bloom of young years
|
|
on them and laughter of red lips and memories in
|
|
their eyes of dances the night before and plays and
|
|
walks.
|
|
Green and gray streams run side by side in a river and
|
|
so here are always the others, those who have been
|
|
over the way, the women who know each one the
|
|
end of life's gamble for her, the meaning and the
|
|
clew, the how and the why of the dances and the
|
|
arms that passed around their waists and the fingers
|
|
that played in their hair.
|
|
Faces go by written over: "I know it all, I know where
|
|
the bloom and the laughter go and I have memories,"
|
|
and the feet of these move slower and they
|
|
have wisdom where the others have beauty.
|
|
So the green and the gray move in the early morning
|
|
on the downtown streets.
|
|
|
|
MAMIE
|
|
|
|
MAMIE beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana
|
|
town and dreamed of romance and big things off
|
|
somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.
|
|
She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down
|
|
where the streaks of steel flashed in the sun and
|
|
when the newspapers came in on the morning mail
|
|
she knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all
|
|
the trains ran.
|
|
She got tired of the barber shop boys and the post office
|
|
chatter and the church gossip and the old pieces the
|
|
band played on the Fourth of July and Decoration Day
|
|
And sobbed at her fate and beat her head against the
|
|
bars and was going to kill herself
|
|
When the thought came to her that if she was going to
|
|
die she might as well die struggling for a clutch of
|
|
romance among the streets of Chicago.
|
|
She has a job now at six dollars a week in the basement
|
|
of the Boston Store
|
|
And even now she beats her head against the bars in the
|
|
same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place
|
|
the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe
|
|
there is
|
|
|
|
romance
|
|
and big things
|
|
and real dreams
|
|
that never go smash.
|
|
|
|
PERSONALITY
|
|
|
|
Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau
|
|
|
|
YOU have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.
|
|
You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only
|
|
one thumb.
|
|
You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and
|
|
win all the world's honors, but when you come back
|
|
home the print of the one thumb your mother gave
|
|
you is the same print of thumb you had in the old
|
|
home when your mother kissed you and said good-by.
|
|
Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men
|
|
and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one anothers'
|
|
throats for room to stand and among them all
|
|
are not two thumbs alike.
|
|
Somewhere is a Great God of Thumbs who can tell the
|
|
inside story of this.
|
|
|
|
CUMULATIVES
|
|
|
|
STORMS have beaten on this point of land
|
|
And ships gone to wreck here
|
|
and the passers-by remember it
|
|
with talk on the deck at night
|
|
as they near it.
|
|
|
|
Fists have beaten on the face of this old prize-fighter
|
|
And his battles have held the sporting pages
|
|
and on the street they indicate him with their
|
|
right fore-finger as one who once wore
|
|
a championship belt.
|
|
|
|
A hundred stories have been published and a thousand rumored
|
|
About why this tall dark man has divorced two beautiful
|
|
young women
|
|
And married a third who resembles the first two
|
|
and they shake their heads and say, "There he
|
|
goes,"
|
|
when he passes by in sunny weather or in rain
|
|
along the city streets.
|
|
|
|
TO CERTAIN JOURNEYMEN
|
|
|
|
UNDERTAKERS, hearse drivers, grave diggers,
|
|
I speak to you as one not afraid of your business.
|
|
|
|
You handle dust going to a long country,
|
|
You know the secret behind your job is the same whether
|
|
you lower the coffin with modern, automatic machinery,
|
|
well-oiled and noiseless, or whether the
|
|
body is laid in by naked hands and then covered
|
|
by the shovels.
|
|
|
|
Your day's work is done with laughter many days of the year,
|
|
And you earn a living by those who say good-by today
|
|
in thin whispers.
|
|
|
|
CHAMFORT
|
|
|
|
THERE'S Chamfort. He's a sample.
|
|
Locked himself in his library with a gun,
|
|
Shot off his nose and shot out his right eye.
|
|
And this Chamfort knew how to write
|
|
And thousands read his books on how to live,
|
|
But he himself didn't know
|
|
How to die by force of his own hand--see?
|
|
They found him a red pool on the carpet
|
|
Cool as an April forenoon,
|
|
Talking and talking gay maxims and grim epigrams.
|
|
Well, he wore bandages over his nose and right eye,
|
|
Drank coffee and chatted many years
|
|
With men and women who loved him
|
|
Because he laughed and daily dared Death:
|
|
"Come and take me."
|
|
|
|
LIMITED
|
|
|
|
I AM riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
|
|
of the nation.
|
|
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
|
|
go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
|
|
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
|
|
and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
|
|
pass to ashes.)
|
|
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
|
|
answers: "Omaha."
|
|
|
|
THE HAS-BEEN
|
|
|
|
A STONE face higher than six horses stood five thousand
|
|
years gazing at the world seeming to clutch a secret.
|
|
A boy passes and throws a niggerhead that chips off the
|
|
end of the nose from the stone face; he lets fly a
|
|
mud ball that spatters the right eye and cheek of the
|
|
old looker-on.
|
|
The boy laughs and goes whistling "ee-ee-ee ee-ee-ee."
|
|
The stone face stands silent, seeming to clutch a
|
|
secret.
|
|
|
|
IN A BACK ALLEY
|
|
|
|
REMEMBRANCE for a great man is this.
|
|
The newsies are pitching pennies.
|
|
And on the copper disk is the man's face.
|
|
Dead lover of boys, what do you ask for now?
|
|
|
|
A COIN
|
|
|
|
YOUR western heads here cast on money,
|
|
You are the two that fade away together,
|
|
Partners in the mist.
|
|
|
|
Lunging buffalo shoulder,
|
|
Lean Indian face,
|
|
We who come after where you are gone
|
|
Salute your forms on the new nickel.
|
|
|
|
You are
|
|
To us:
|
|
The past.
|
|
|
|
Runners
|
|
On the prairie:
|
|
Good-by.
|
|
|
|
DYNAMITER
|
|
|
|
I SAT with a dynamiter at supper in a German saloon
|
|
eating steak and onions.
|
|
And he laughed and told stories of his wife and children
|
|
and the cause of labor and the working class.
|
|
It was laughter of an unshakable man knowing life to be
|
|
a rich and red-blooded thing.
|
|
Yes, his laugh rang like the call of gray birds filled with
|
|
a glory of joy ramming their winged flight through
|
|
a rain storm.
|
|
His name was in many newspapers as an enemy of the
|
|
nation and few keepers of churches or schools would
|
|
open their doors to him.
|
|
Over the steak and onions not a word was said of his
|
|
deep days and nights as a dynamiter.
|
|
Only I always remember him as a lover of life, a lover
|
|
of children, a lover of all free, reckless laughter
|
|
everywhere--lover of red hearts and red blood the
|
|
world over.
|
|
|
|
ICE HANDLER
|
|
|
|
I KNOW an ice handler who wears a flannel shirt with
|
|
pearl buttons the size of a dollar,
|
|
And he lugs a hundred-pound hunk into a saloon ice-
|
|
box, helps himself to cold ham and rye bread,
|
|
Tells the bartender it's hotter than yesterday and will be
|
|
hotter yet to-morrow, by Jesus,
|
|
And is on his way with his head in the air and a hard
|
|
pair of fists.
|
|
He spends a dollar or so every Saturday night on a two
|
|
hundred pound woman who washes dishes in the
|
|
Hotel Morrison.
|
|
He remembers when the union was organized he broke
|
|
the noses of two scabs and loosened the nuts so the
|
|
wheels came off six different wagons one morning,
|
|
and he came around and watched the ice melt in the
|
|
street.
|
|
All he was sorry for was one of the scabs bit him on the
|
|
knuckles of the right hand so they bled when he
|
|
came around to the saloon to tell the boys about it.
|
|
|
|
JACK
|
|
|
|
JACK was a swarthy, swaggering son-of-a-gun.
|
|
He worked thirty years on the railroad, ten hours a day,
|
|
and his hands were tougher than sole leather.
|
|
He married a tough woman and they had eight children
|
|
and the woman died and the children grew up and
|
|
went away and wrote the old man every two years.
|
|
He died in the poorhouse sitting on a bench in the sun
|
|
telling reminiscences to other old men whose women
|
|
were dead and children scattered.
|
|
There was joy on his face when he died as there was joy
|
|
on his face when he lived--he was a swarthy, swaggering
|
|
son-of-a-gun.
|
|
|
|
FELLOW CITIZENS
|
|
|
|
I DRANK musty ale at the Illinois Athletic Club with
|
|
the millionaire manufacturer of Green River butter
|
|
one night
|
|
And his face had the shining light of an old-time Quaker,
|
|
he spoke of a beautiful daughter, and I knew he had
|
|
a peace and a happiness up his sleeve somewhere.
|
|
Then I heard Jim Kirch make a speech to the Advertising
|
|
Association on the trade resources of South America.
|
|
And the way he lighted a three-for-a-nickel stogie and
|
|
cocked it at an angle regardless of the manners of
|
|
our best people,
|
|
I knew he had a clutch on a real happiness even though
|
|
some of the reporters on his newspaper say he is
|
|
the living double of Jack London's Sea Wolf.
|
|
In the mayor's office the mayor himself told me he was
|
|
happy though it is a hard job to satisfy all the office-
|
|
seekers and eat all the dinners he is asked to eat.
|
|
Down in Gilpin Place, near Hull House, was a man with
|
|
his jaw wrapped for a bad toothache,
|
|
And he had it all over the butter millionaire, Jim Kirch
|
|
and the mayor when it came to happiness.
|
|
He is a maker of accordions and guitars and not only
|
|
makes them from start to finish, but plays them
|
|
after he makes them.
|
|
And he had a guitar of mahogany with a walnut bottom
|
|
he offered for seven dollars and a half if I wanted it,
|
|
And another just like it, only smaller, for six dollars,
|
|
though he never mentioned the price till I asked him,
|
|
And he stated the price in a sorry way, as though the
|
|
music and the make of an instrument count for a
|
|
million times more than the price in money.
|
|
I thought he had a real soul and knew a lot about God.
|
|
There was light in his eyes of one who has conquered
|
|
sorrow in so far as sorrow is conquerable or worth
|
|
conquering.
|
|
Anyway he is the only Chicago citizen I was jealous of
|
|
that day.
|
|
He played a dance they play in some parts of Italy
|
|
when the harvest of grapes is over and the wine
|
|
presses are ready for work.
|
|
|
|
NIGGER
|
|
|
|
I AM the nigger.
|
|
Singer of songs,
|
|
Dancer. . .
|
|
Softer than fluff of cotton. . .
|
|
Harder than dark earth
|
|
Roads beaten in the sun
|
|
By the bare feet of slaves. . .
|
|
Foam of teeth. . . breaking crash of laughter. . .
|
|
Red love of the blood of woman,
|
|
White love of the tumbling pickaninnies. . .
|
|
Lazy love of the banjo thrum. . .
|
|
Sweated and driven for the harvest-wage,
|
|
Loud laugher with hands like hams,
|
|
Fists toughened on the handles,
|
|
Smiling the slumber dreams of old jungles,
|
|
Crazy as the sun and dew and dripping, heaving life
|
|
of the jungle,
|
|
Brooding and muttering with memories of shackles:
|
|
I am the nigger.
|
|
Look at me.
|
|
I am the nigger.
|
|
|
|
TWO NEIGHBORS
|
|
|
|
FACES of two eternities keep looking at me.
|
|
One is Omar Khayam and the red stuff
|
|
wherein men forget yesterday and to-morrow
|
|
and remember only the voices and songs,
|
|
the stories, newspapers and fights of today.
|
|
One is Louis Cornaro and a slim trick
|
|
of slow, short meals across slow, short years,
|
|
letting Death open the door only in slow, short inches.
|
|
I have a neighbor who swears by Omar.
|
|
I have a neighbor who swears by Cornaro.
|
|
Both are happy.
|
|
Faces of two eternities keep looking at me.
|
|
Let them look.
|
|
|
|
STYLE
|
|
|
|
STYLE--go ahead talking about style.
|
|
You can tell where a man gets his style just
|
|
as you can tell where Pavlowa got her legs
|
|
or Ty Cobb his batting eye.
|
|
|
|
Go on talking.
|
|
Only don't take my style away.
|
|
It's my face.
|
|
Maybe no good
|
|
but anyway, my face.
|
|
I talk with it, I sing with it, I see, taste and feel with it,
|
|
I know why I want to keep it.
|
|
|
|
Kill my style
|
|
and you break Pavlowa's legs,
|
|
and you blind Ty Cobb's batting eye.
|
|
|
|
TO BEACHEY, 1912
|
|
|
|
RIDING against the east,
|
|
A veering, steady shadow
|
|
Purrs the motor-call
|
|
Of the man-bird
|
|
Ready with the death-laughter
|
|
In his throat
|
|
And in his heart always
|
|
The love of the big blue beyond.
|
|
|
|
Only a man,
|
|
A far fleck of shadow on the east
|
|
Sitting at ease
|
|
With his hands on a wheel
|
|
And around him the large gray wings.
|
|
Hold him, great soft wings,
|
|
Keep and deal kindly, O wings,
|
|
With the cool, calm shadow at the wheel.
|
|
|
|
UNDER A HAT RIM
|
|
|
|
WHILE the hum and the hurry
|
|
Of passing footfalls
|
|
Beat in my ear like the restless surf
|
|
Of a wind-blown sea,
|
|
A soul came to me
|
|
Out of the look on a face.
|
|
|
|
Eyes like a lake
|
|
Where a storm-wind roams
|
|
Caught me from under
|
|
The rim of a hat.
|
|
I thought of a midsea wreck
|
|
and bruised fingers clinging
|
|
to a broken state-room door.
|
|
|
|
IN A BREATH
|
|
|
|
To the Williamson Brothers
|
|
|
|
HIGH noon. White sun flashes on the Michigan Avenue
|
|
asphalt. Drum of hoofs and whirr of motors.
|
|
Women trapsing along in flimsy clothes catching
|
|
play of sun-fire to their skin and eyes.
|
|
|
|
Inside the playhouse are movies from under the sea.
|
|
From the heat of pavements and the dust of sidewalks,
|
|
passers-by go in a breath to be witnesses of
|
|
large cool sponges, large cool fishes, large cool valleys
|
|
and ridges of coral spread silent in the soak of
|
|
the ocean floor thousands of years.
|
|
|
|
A naked swimmer dives. A knife in his right hand
|
|
shoots a streak at the throat of a shark. The tail
|
|
of the shark lashes. One swing would kill the swimmer. . .
|
|
Soon the knife goes into the soft under-
|
|
neck of the veering fish. . . Its mouthful of teeth,
|
|
each tooth a dagger itself, set row on row, glistens
|
|
when the shuddering, yawning cadaver is hauled up
|
|
by the brothers of the swimmer.
|
|
|
|
Outside in the street is the murmur and singing of life
|
|
in the sun--horses, motors, women trapsing along
|
|
in flimsy clothes, play of sun-fire in their blood.
|
|
|
|
BATH
|
|
|
|
A MAN saw the whole world as a grinning skull and
|
|
cross-bones. The rose flesh of life shriveled from all
|
|
faces. Nothing counts. Everything is a fake. Dust to
|
|
dust and ashes to ashes and then an old darkness and a
|
|
useless silence. So he saw it all. Then he went to a
|
|
Mischa Elman concert. Two hours waves of sound beat
|
|
on his eardrums. Music washed something or other
|
|
inside him. Music broke down and rebuilt something or
|
|
other in his head and heart. He joined in five encores
|
|
for the young Russian Jew with the fiddle. When he
|
|
got outside his heels hit the sidewalk a new way. He
|
|
was the same man in the same world as before. Only
|
|
there was a singing fire and a climb of roses everlastingly
|
|
over the world he looked on.
|
|
|
|
BRONZES
|
|
|
|
I
|
|
|
|
THE bronze General Grant riding a bronze horse in Lincoln
|
|
Park
|
|
Shrivels in the sun by day when the motor cars whirr
|
|
by in long processions going somewhere to keep appointment
|
|
for dinner and matinees and buying and selling
|
|
Though in the dusk and nightfall when high waves are piling
|
|
On the slabs of the promenade along the lake shore near by
|
|
I have seen the general dare the combers come closer
|
|
And make to ride his bronze horse out into the hoofs
|
|
and guns of the storm.
|
|
|
|
II
|
|
|
|
I cross Lincoln Park on a winter night when the snow
|
|
is falling.
|
|
Lincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow,
|
|
his bronze forehead meeting soft echoes of the newsies
|
|
crying forty thousand men are dead along the
|
|
Yser, his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar
|
|
of the city at his bronze feet.
|
|
A lithe Indian on a bronze pony, Shakespeare seated with
|
|
long legs in bronze, Garibaldi in a bronze cape, they
|
|
hold places in the cold, lonely snow to-night on their
|
|
pedestals and so they will hold them past midnight
|
|
and into the dawn.
|
|
|
|
DUNES
|
|
|
|
WHAT do we see here in the sand dunes of the white
|
|
moon alone with our thoughts, Bill,
|
|
Alone with our dreams, Bill, soft as the women tying
|
|
scarves around their heads dancing,
|
|
Alone with a picture and a picture coming one after the
|
|
other of all the dead,
|
|
The dead more than all these grains of sand one by one
|
|
piled here in the moon,
|
|
Piled against the sky-line taking shapes like the hand of
|
|
the wind wanted,
|
|
What do we see here, Bill, outside of what the wise men
|
|
beat their heads on,
|
|
Outside of what the poets cry for and the soldiers drive
|
|
on headlong and leave their skulls in the sun for--
|
|
what, Bill?
|
|
|
|
ON THE WAY
|
|
|
|
LITTLE one, you have been buzzing in the books,
|
|
Flittering in the newspapers and drinking beer with
|
|
lawyers
|
|
And amid the educated men of the clubs you have been
|
|
getting an earful of speech from trained tongues.
|
|
Take an earful from me once, go with me on a hike
|
|
Along sand stretches on the great inland sea here
|
|
And while the eastern breeze blows on us and the
|
|
restless surge
|
|
Of the lake waves on the breakwater breaks with an ever
|
|
fresh monotone,
|
|
Let us ask ourselves: What is truth? what do you or I
|
|
know?
|
|
How much do the wisest of the world's men know about
|
|
where the massed human procession is going?
|
|
|
|
You have heard the mob laughed at?
|
|
I ask you: Is not the mob rough as the mountains are
|
|
rough?
|
|
And all things human rise from the mob and relapse and
|
|
rise again as rain to the sea?
|
|
|
|
READY TO KILL
|
|
|
|
TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.
|
|
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
|
|
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
|
|
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver
|
|
on him.
|
|
I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be
|
|
hauled away to the scrap yard.
|
|
I put it straight to you,
|
|
After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory
|
|
hand, the fireman and the teamster,
|
|
Have all been remembered with bronze memorials,
|
|
Shaping them on the job of getting all of us
|
|
Something to eat and something to wear,
|
|
When they stack a few silhouettes
|
|
Against the sky
|
|
Here in the park,
|
|
And show the real huskies that are doing the work of
|
|
the world, and feeding people instead of butchering them,
|
|
Then maybe I will stand here
|
|
And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag
|
|
in the air,
|
|
And riding like hell on horseback
|
|
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
|
|
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men
|
|
all over the sweet new grass of the prairie.
|
|
|
|
TO A CONTEMPORARY BUNKSHOOTER
|
|
|
|
You come along. . . tearing your shirt. . . yelling about
|
|
Jesus.
|
|
Where do you get that stuff?
|
|
What do you know about Jesus?
|
|
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few
|
|
bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem
|
|
everybody liked to have this Jesus around because
|
|
he never made any fake passes and everything
|
|
he said went and he helped the sick and gave the
|
|
people hope.
|
|
|
|
You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist
|
|
and calling us all dam fools so fierce the froth slobbers
|
|
over your lips. . . always blabbing we're all
|
|
going to hell straight off and you know all about it.
|
|
|
|
I've read Jesus' words. I know what he said. You don't
|
|
throw any scare into me. I've got your number. I
|
|
know how much you know about Jesus.
|
|
He never came near clean people or dirty people but
|
|
they felt cleaner because he came along. It was your
|
|
crowd of bankers and business men and lawyers
|
|
hired the sluggers and murderers who put Jesus out
|
|
of the running.
|
|
|
|
I say the same bunch backing you nailed the nails into
|
|
the hands of this Jesus of Nazareth. He had lined
|
|
up against him the same crooks and strong-arm men
|
|
now lined up with you paying your way.
|
|
|
|
This Jesus was good to look at, smelled good, listened
|
|
good. He threw out something fresh and beautiful
|
|
from the skin of his body and the touch of his hands
|
|
wherever he passed along.
|
|
You slimy bunkshooter, you put a smut on every human
|
|
blossom in reach of your rotten breath belching
|
|
about hell-fire and hiccupping about this Man who
|
|
lived a clean life in Galilee.
|
|
|
|
When are you going to quit making the carpenters build
|
|
emergency hospitals for women and girls driven
|
|
crazy with wrecked nerves from your gibberish about
|
|
Jesus--I put it to you again: Where do you get that
|
|
stuff; what do you know about Jesus?
|
|
|
|
Go ahead and bust all the chairs you want to. Smash
|
|
a whole wagon load of furniture at every performance.
|
|
Turn sixty somersaults and stand on your
|
|
nutty head. If it wasn't for the way you scare the
|
|
women and kids I'd feel sorry for you and pass the hat.
|
|
I like to watch a good four-flusher work, but not when
|
|
he starts people puking and calling for the doctors.
|
|
I like a man that's got nerve and can pull off a great
|
|
original performance, but you--you're only a bug-
|
|
house peddler of second-hand gospel--you're only
|
|
shoving out a phoney imitation of the goods this
|
|
Jesus wanted free as air and sunlight.
|
|
|
|
You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it
|
|
up all right with them by giving them mansions in
|
|
the skies after they're dead and the worms have
|
|
eaten 'em.
|
|
You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need
|
|
is Jesus; you take a steel trust wop, dead without
|
|
having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of
|
|
age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross
|
|
and he'll be all right.
|
|
You tell poor people they don't need any more money
|
|
on pay day and even if it's fierce to be out of a job,
|
|
Jesus'll fix that up all right, all right--all they gotta
|
|
do is take Jesus the way you say.
|
|
I'm telling you Jesus wouldn't stand for the stuff you're
|
|
handing out. Jesus played it different. The bankers
|
|
and lawyers of Jerusalem got their sluggers and
|
|
murderers to go after Jesus just because Jesus
|
|
wouldn't play their game. He didn't sit in with
|
|
the big thieves.
|
|
|
|
I don't want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.
|
|
I won't take my religion from any man who never works
|
|
except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory
|
|
except the face of the woman on the American
|
|
silver dollar.
|
|
|
|
I ask you to come through and show me where you're
|
|
pouring out the blood of your life.
|
|
|
|
I've been to this suburb of Jerusalem they call Golgotha,
|
|
where they nailed Him, and I know if the story is
|
|
straight it was real blood ran from His hands and
|
|
the nail-holes, and it was real blood spurted in red
|
|
drops where the spear of the Roman soldier rammed
|
|
in between the ribs of this Jesus of Nazareth.
|
|
|
|
SKYSCRAPER
|
|
|
|
BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
|
|
has a soul.
|
|
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
|
|
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
|
|
poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
|
|
valleys.
|
|
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
|
|
out all day that give the building a soul of dreams
|
|
and thoughts and memories.
|
|
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care
|
|
for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman
|
|
the way to it?)
|
|
|
|
Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and
|
|
parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and
|
|
sewage out.
|
|
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,
|
|
and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men
|
|
grappling plans of business and questions of women
|
|
in plots of love.
|
|
|
|
Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
|
|
earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
|
|
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
|
|
hold together the stone walls and floors.
|
|
|
|
Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the
|
|
mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an
|
|
architect voted.
|
|
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,
|
|
and the press of time running into centuries, play
|
|
on the building inside and out and use it.
|
|
|
|
Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid
|
|
in graves where the wind whistles a wild song
|
|
without words
|
|
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes
|
|
and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
|
|
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging
|
|
at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-
|
|
layer who went to state's prison for shooting another
|
|
man while drunk.
|
|
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the
|
|
end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has
|
|
gone into the stones of the building.)
|
|
|
|
On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names
|
|
and each name standing for a face written across
|
|
with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving
|
|
ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's
|
|
ease of life.
|
|
|
|
Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls
|
|
tell nothing from room to room.
|
|
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from
|
|
corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers,
|
|
and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all
|
|
ends of the earth.
|
|
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of
|
|
the building just the same as the master-men who
|
|
rule the building.
|
|
|
|
Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor
|
|
empties its men and women who go away and eat
|
|
and come back to work.
|
|
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and
|
|
all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on
|
|
them.
|
|
One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed
|
|
elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers
|
|
work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water
|
|
and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,
|
|
and machine grime of the day.
|
|
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling
|
|
miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for
|
|
money. The sign speaks till midnight.
|
|
|
|
Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence
|
|
holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor
|
|
and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip
|
|
pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money
|
|
is stacked in them.
|
|
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights
|
|
of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of
|
|
red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span
|
|
of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of
|
|
crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
|
|
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars
|
|
and has a soul.
|
|
|
|
HANDFULS
|
|
|
|
FOG
|
|
|
|
THE fog comes
|
|
on little cat feet.
|
|
|
|
It sits looking
|
|
over harbor and city
|
|
on silent haunches
|
|
and then moves on.
|
|
|
|
POOL
|
|
|
|
OUT of the fire
|
|
Came a man sunken
|
|
To less than cinders,
|
|
A tea-cup of ashes or so.
|
|
And I,
|
|
The gold in the house,
|
|
Writhed into a stiff pool.
|
|
|
|
JAN KUBELIK
|
|
|
|
YOUR bow swept over a string, and a long low note
|
|
quivered to the air.
|
|
(A mother of Bohemia sobs over a new child perfect
|
|
learning to suck milk.)
|
|
|
|
Your bow ran fast over all the high strings fluttering
|
|
and wild.
|
|
(All the girls in Bohemia are laughing on a Sunday afternoon
|
|
in the hills with their lovers.)
|
|
|
|
CHOOSE
|
|
|
|
THE single clenched fist lifted and ready,
|
|
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.
|
|
Choose:
|
|
For we meet by one or the other.
|
|
|
|
CRIMSON
|
|
|
|
CRIMSON is the slow smolder of the cigar end I hold,
|
|
Gray is the ash that stiffens and covers all silent the fire.
|
|
(A great man I know is dead and while he lies in his
|
|
coffin a gone flame I sit here in cumbering shadows
|
|
and smoke and watch my thoughts come and go.)
|
|
|
|
WHITELIGHT
|
|
|
|
YOUR whitelight flashes the frost to-night
|
|
Moon of the purple and silent west.
|
|
Remember me one of your lovers of dreams.
|
|
|
|
FLUX
|
|
|
|
SAND of the sea runs red
|
|
Where the sunset reaches and quivers.
|
|
Sand of the sea runs yellow
|
|
Where the moon slants and wavers.
|
|
|
|
KIN
|
|
|
|
BROTHER, I am fire
|
|
Surging under the ocean floor.
|
|
I shall never meet you, brother--
|
|
Not for years, anyhow;
|
|
Maybe thousands of years, brother.
|
|
Then I will warm you,
|
|
Hold you close, wrap you in circles,
|
|
Use you and change you--
|
|
Maybe thousands of years, brother.
|
|
|
|
WHITE SHOULDERS
|
|
|
|
YOUR white shoulders
|
|
I remember
|
|
And your shrug of laughter.
|
|
|
|
Low laughter
|
|
Shaken slow
|
|
From your white shoulders.
|
|
|
|
LOSSES
|
|
|
|
I HAVE love
|
|
And a child,
|
|
A banjo
|
|
And shadows.
|
|
(Losses of God,
|
|
All will go
|
|
And one day
|
|
We will hold
|
|
Only the shadows.)
|
|
|
|
TROTHS
|
|
|
|
YELLOW dust on a bumble
|
|
bee's wing,
|
|
Grey lights in a woman's
|
|
asking eyes,
|
|
Red ruins in the changing
|
|
sunset embers:
|
|
I take you and pile high
|
|
the memories.
|
|
Death will break her claws
|
|
on some I keep.
|
|
|
|
WAR POEMS
|
|
(1914-1915)
|
|
|
|
KILLERS
|
|
|
|
I AM singing to you
|
|
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
|
|
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
|
|
Held where he cannot move:
|
|
|
|
Under the sun
|
|
Are sixteen million men,
|
|
Chosen for shining teeth,
|
|
Sharp eyes, hard legs,
|
|
And a running of young warm blood in their wrists.
|
|
|
|
And a red juice runs on the green grass;
|
|
And a red juice soaks the dark soil.
|
|
And the sixteen million are killing. . . and killing
|
|
and killing.
|
|
|
|
I never forget them day or night:
|
|
They beat on my head for memory of them;
|
|
They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,
|
|
To their homes and women, dreams and games.
|
|
|
|
I wake in the night and smell the trenches,
|
|
And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines--
|
|
Sixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark:
|
|
Some of them long sleepers for always,
|
|
|
|
Some of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for always,
|
|
Fixed in the drag of the world's heartbreak,
|
|
Eating and drinking, toiling. . . on a long job of
|
|
killing.
|
|
Sixteen million men.
|
|
|
|
AMONG THE RED GUNS
|
|
|
|
After waking at dawn one morning when the wind sang
|
|
low among dry leaves in an elm
|
|
|
|
AMONG the red guns,
|
|
In the hearts of soldiers
|
|
Running free blood
|
|
In the long, long campaign:
|
|
Dreams go on.
|
|
|
|
Among the leather saddles,
|
|
In the heads of soldiers
|
|
Heavy in the wracks and kills
|
|
Of all straight fighting:
|
|
Dreams go on.
|
|
|
|
Among the hot muzzles,
|
|
In the hands of soldiers
|
|
Brought from flesh-folds of women--
|
|
Soft amid the blood and crying--
|
|
In all your hearts and heads
|
|
Among the guns and saddles and muzzles:
|
|
|
|
Dreams,
|
|
Dreams go on,
|
|
Out of the dead on their backs,
|
|
Broken and no use any more:
|
|
Dreams of the way and the end go on.
|
|
|
|
IRON
|
|
|
|
GUNS,
|
|
Long, steel guns,
|
|
Pointed from the war ships
|
|
In the name of the war god.
|
|
Straight, shining, polished guns,
|
|
Clambered over with jackies in white blouses,
|
|
Glory of tan faces, tousled hair, white teeth,
|
|
Laughing lithe jackies in white blouses,
|
|
Sitting on the guns singing war songs, war chanties.
|
|
|
|
Shovels,
|
|
Broad, iron shovels,
|
|
Scooping out oblong vaults,
|
|
Loosening turf and leveling sod.
|
|
|
|
I ask you
|
|
To witness--
|
|
The shovel is brother to the gun.
|
|
|
|
MURMURINGS IN A FIELD HOSPITAL
|
|
|
|
[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two
|
|
days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.]
|
|
|
|
COME to me only with playthings now. . .
|
|
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
|
|
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers. . .
|
|
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
|
|
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world. . .
|
|
|
|
No more iron cold and real to handle,
|
|
Shaped for a drive straight ahead.
|
|
Bring me only beautiful useless things.
|
|
Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet. . .
|
|
And at the window one day in summer
|
|
Yellow of the new crock of butter
|
|
Stood against the red of new climbing roses. . .
|
|
And the world was all playthings.
|
|
|
|
STATISTICS
|
|
|
|
NAPOLEON shifted,
|
|
Restless in the old sarcophagus
|
|
And murmured to a watchguard:
|
|
"Who goes there?"
|
|
"Twenty-one million men,
|
|
Soldiers, armies, guns,
|
|
Twenty-one million
|
|
Afoot, horseback,
|
|
In the air,
|
|
Under the sea."
|
|
And Napoleon turned to his sleep:
|
|
"It is not my world answering;
|
|
It is some dreamer who knows not
|
|
The world I marched in
|
|
From Calais to Moscow."
|
|
And he slept on
|
|
In the old sarcophagus
|
|
While the aeroplanes
|
|
Droned their motors
|
|
Between Napoleon's mausoleum
|
|
And the cool night stars.
|
|
|
|
FIGHT
|
|
|
|
RED drips from my chin where I have been eating.
|
|
Not all the blood, nowhere near all, is wiped off my mouth.
|
|
|
|
Clots of red mess my hair
|
|
And the tiger, the buffalo, know how.
|
|
|
|
I was a killer.
|
|
Yes, I am a killer.
|
|
|
|
I come from killing.
|
|
I go to more.
|
|
I drive red joy ahead of me from killing.
|
|
Red gluts and red hungers run in the smears and juices
|
|
of my inside bones:
|
|
The child cries for a suck mother and I cry for war.
|
|
|
|
BUTTONS
|
|
|
|
I HAVE been watching the war map slammed up for
|
|
advertising in front of the newspaper office.
|
|
Buttons--red and yellow buttons--blue and black buttons--
|
|
are shoved back and forth across the map.
|
|
|
|
A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,
|
|
Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,
|
|
And then fixes a yellow button one inch west
|
|
And follows the yellow button with a black button one
|
|
inch west.
|
|
|
|
(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in
|
|
a red soak along a river edge,
|
|
Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling
|
|
death in their throats.)
|
|
Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one
|
|
inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper
|
|
office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing
|
|
to us?
|
|
|
|
AND THEY OBEY
|
|
|
|
SMASH down the cities.
|
|
Knock the walls to pieces.
|
|
Break the factories and cathedrals, warehouses
|
|
and homes
|
|
Into loose piles of stone and lumber and black
|
|
burnt wood:
|
|
You are the soldiers and we command you.
|
|
|
|
Build up the cities.
|
|
Set up the walls again.
|
|
Put together once more the factories and cathedrals,
|
|
warehouses and homes
|
|
Into buildings for life and labor:
|
|
You are workmen and citizens all: We
|
|
command you.
|
|
|
|
JAWS
|
|
|
|
SEVEN nations stood with their hands on the jaws of death.
|
|
It was the first week in August, Nineteen Hundred Fourteen.
|
|
I was listening, you were listening, the whole world was
|
|
listening,
|
|
And all of us heard a Voice murmuring:
|
|
"I am the way and the light,
|
|
He that believeth on me
|
|
Shall not perish
|
|
But shall have everlasting life."
|
|
Seven nations listening heard the Voice and answered:
|
|
"O Hell!"
|
|
The jaws of death began clicking and they go on clicking.
|
|
"O Hell!"
|
|
|
|
SALVAGE
|
|
|
|
GUNS on the battle lines have pounded now a year
|
|
between Brussels and Paris.
|
|
And, William Morris, when I read your old chapter on
|
|
the great arches and naves and little whimsical
|
|
corners of the Churches of Northern France--Brr-rr!
|
|
I'm glad you're a dead man, William Morris, I'm glad
|
|
you're down in the damp and mouldy, only a memory
|
|
instead of a living man--I'm glad you're gone.
|
|
You never lied to us, William Morris, you loved the
|
|
shape of those stones piled and carved for you to
|
|
dream over and wonder because workmen got joy
|
|
of life into them,
|
|
Workmen in aprons singing while they hammered, and
|
|
praying, and putting their songs and prayers into
|
|
the walls and roofs, the bastions and cornerstones
|
|
and gargoyles--all their children and kisses of
|
|
women and wheat and roses growing.
|
|
I say, William Morris, I'm glad you're gone, I'm glad
|
|
you're a dead man.
|
|
Guns on the battle lines have pounded a year now between
|
|
Brussels and Paris.
|
|
|
|
WARS
|
|
|
|
IN the old wars drum of hoofs and the beat of shod feet.
|
|
In the new wars hum of motors and the tread of rubber tires.
|
|
In the wars to come silent wheels and whirr of rods not
|
|
yet dreamed out in the heads of men.
|
|
|
|
In the old wars clutches of short swords and jabs into
|
|
faces with spears.
|
|
In the new wars long range guns and smashed walls, guns
|
|
running a spit of metal and men falling in tens and
|
|
twenties.
|
|
In the wars to come new silent deaths, new silent hurlers
|
|
not yet dreamed out in the heads of men.
|
|
|
|
In the old wars kings quarreling and thousands of men
|
|
following.
|
|
In the new wars kings quarreling and millions of men
|
|
following.
|
|
In the wars to come kings kicked under the dust and
|
|
millions of men following great causes not yet
|
|
dreamed out in the heads of men.
|
|
|
|
THE ROAD AND THE END
|
|
|
|
THE ROAD AND THE END
|
|
|
|
I SHALL foot it
|
|
Down the roadway in the dusk,
|
|
Where shapes of hunger wander
|
|
And the fugitives of pain go by.
|
|
I shall foot it
|
|
In the silence of the morning,
|
|
See the night slur into dawn,
|
|
Hear the slow great winds arise
|
|
Where tall trees flank the way
|
|
And shoulder toward the sky.
|
|
|
|
The broken boulders by the road
|
|
Shall not commemorate my ruin.
|
|
Regret shall be the gravel under foot.
|
|
I shall watch for
|
|
Slim birds swift of wing
|
|
That go where wind and ranks of thunder
|
|
Drive the wild processionals of rain.
|
|
|
|
The dust of the traveled road
|
|
Shall touch my hands and face.
|
|
|
|
CHOICES
|
|
|
|
THEY offer you many things,
|
|
I a few.
|
|
Moonlight on the play of fountains at night
|
|
With water sparkling a drowsy monotone,
|
|
Bare-shouldered, smiling women and talk
|
|
And a cross-play of loves and adulteries
|
|
And a fear of death and a remembering of regrets:
|
|
All this they offer you.
|
|
I come with:
|
|
salt and bread
|
|
a terrible job of work
|
|
and tireless war;
|
|
Come and have now:
|
|
hunger.
|
|
danger
|
|
and hate.
|
|
|
|
GRAVES
|
|
|
|
I DREAMED one man stood against a thousand,
|
|
One man damned as a wrongheaded fool.
|
|
One year and another he walked the streets,
|
|
And a thousand shrugs and hoots
|
|
Met him in the shoulders and mouths he passed.
|
|
|
|
He died alone.
|
|
And only the undertaker came to his funeral.
|
|
|
|
Flowers grow over his grave anod in the wind,
|
|
And over the graves of the thousand, too,
|
|
The flowers grow anod in the wind.
|
|
|
|
Flowers and the wind,
|
|
Flowers anod over the graves of the dead,
|
|
Petals of red, leaves of yellow, streaks of white,
|
|
Masses of purple sagging. . .
|
|
I love you and your great way of forgetting.
|
|
|
|
AZTEC MASK
|
|
|
|
I WANTED a man's face looking into the jaws and throat
|
|
of life
|
|
With something proud on his face, so proud no smash
|
|
of the jaws,
|
|
No gulp of the throat leaves the face in the end
|
|
With anything else than the old proud look:
|
|
Even to the finish, dumped in the dust,
|
|
Lost among the used-up cinders,
|
|
This face, men would say, is a flash,
|
|
Is laid on bones taken from the ribs of the earth,
|
|
Ready for the hammers of changing, changing years,
|
|
Ready for the sleeping, sleeping years of silence.
|
|
Ready for the dust and fire and wind.
|
|
I wanted this face and I saw it today in an Aztec mask.
|
|
A cry out of storm and dark, a red yell and a purple prayer,
|
|
A beaten shape of ashes
|
|
waiting the sunrise or night,
|
|
something or nothing,
|
|
proud-mouthed,
|
|
proud-eyed gambler.
|
|
|
|
MOMUS
|
|
|
|
MOMUS is the name men give your face,
|
|
The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle
|
|
Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,
|
|
Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray
|
|
Against horizons purple, silent.
|
|
|
|
Yes, Momus,
|
|
Men have flung your face in bronze
|
|
To gaze in gargoyle downward on a street-whirl of folk.
|
|
They were artists did this, shaped your sad mouth,
|
|
Gave you a tall forehead slanted with calm, broad wisdom;
|
|
All your lips to the corners and your cheeks to the high bones
|
|
Thrown over and through with a smile that forever
|
|
wishes and wishes, purple, silent, fled from all the
|
|
iron things of life, evaded like a sought bandit, gone
|
|
into dreams, by God.
|
|
|
|
I wonder, Momus,
|
|
Whether shadows of the dead sit somewhere and look
|
|
with deep laughter
|
|
On men who play in terrible earnest the old, known,
|
|
solemn repetitions of history.
|
|
|
|
A droning monotone soft as sea laughter hovers from
|
|
your kindliness of bronze,
|
|
You give me the human ease of a mountain peak, purple,
|
|
silent;
|
|
Granite shoulders heaving above the earth curves,
|
|
Careless eye-witness of the spawning tides of men and
|
|
women
|
|
Swarming always in a drift of millions to the dust of toil,
|
|
the salt of tears,
|
|
And blood drops of undiminishing war.
|
|
|
|
THE ANSWER
|
|
|
|
You have spoken the answer.
|
|
A child searches far sometimes
|
|
Into the red dust
|
|
On a dark rose leaf
|
|
And so you have gone far
|
|
For the answer is:
|
|
Silence.
|
|
|
|
In the republic
|
|
Of the winking stars and spent cataclysms
|
|
Sure we are it is off there the answer
|
|
is hidden and folded over,
|
|
Sleeping in the sun, careless whether
|
|
it is Sunday or any other day of
|
|
the week,
|
|
|
|
Knowing silence will bring all one way
|
|
or another.
|
|
|
|
Have we not seen
|
|
Purple of the pansy
|
|
out of the mulch
|
|
and mold
|
|
crawl
|
|
into a dusk
|
|
of velvet?
|
|
blur of yellow?
|
|
Almost we thought from nowwhere but it was
|
|
the silence,
|
|
the future,
|
|
working.
|
|
|
|
TO A DEAD MAN
|
|
|
|
OVER the dead line we have called to you
|
|
To come across with a word to us,
|
|
Some beaten whisper of what happens
|
|
Where you are over the dead line
|
|
Deaf to our calls and voiceless.
|
|
|
|
The flickering shadows have not answered
|
|
Nor your lips sent a signal
|
|
Whether love talks and roses grow
|
|
And the sun breaks at morning
|
|
Splattering the sea with crimson.
|
|
|
|
UNDER
|
|
|
|
I
|
|
I AM the undertow
|
|
Washing tides of power
|
|
Battering the pillars
|
|
Under your things of high law.
|
|
|
|
II
|
|
I am a sleepless
|
|
Slowfaring eater,
|
|
Maker of rust and rot
|
|
In your bastioned fastenings,
|
|
Caissons deep.
|
|
|
|
III
|
|
I am the Law
|
|
Older than you
|
|
And your builders proud.
|
|
|
|
I am deaf
|
|
In all days
|
|
Whether you
|
|
Say "Yes" or "No".
|
|
|
|
I am the crumbler:
|
|
To-morrow.
|
|
|
|
A SPHINX
|
|
|
|
CLOSE-MOUTHED you sat five thousand years and never
|
|
let out a whisper.
|
|
Processions came by, marchers, asking questions you
|
|
answered with grey eyes never blinking, shut lips
|
|
never talking.
|
|
Not one croak of anything you know has come from your
|
|
cat crouch of ages.
|
|
I am one of those who know all you know and I keep my
|
|
questions: I know the answers you hold.
|
|
|
|
WHO AM I?
|
|
|
|
MY head knocks against the stars.
|
|
My feet are on the hilltops.
|
|
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
|
|
universal life.
|
|
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I
|
|
reach my hands and play with pebbles of
|
|
destiny.
|
|
I have been to hell and back many times.
|
|
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
|
|
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
|
|
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
|
|
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs
|
|
reading "Keep Off."
|
|
|
|
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
|
|
in the universe.
|
|
|
|
OUR PRAYER OF THANKS
|
|
|
|
FOR the gladness here where the sun is shining at
|
|
evening on the weeds at the river,
|
|
Our prayer of thanks.
|
|
|
|
For the laughter of children who tumble barefooted and
|
|
bareheaded in the summer grass,
|
|
Our prayer of thanks.
|
|
|
|
For the sunset and the stars, the women and the white
|
|
arms that hold us,
|
|
Our prayer of thanks.
|
|
|
|
God,
|
|
If you are deaf and blind, if this is all lost to you,
|
|
God, if the dead in their coffins amid the silver handles
|
|
on the edge of town, or the reckless dead of war
|
|
days thrown unknown in pits, if these dead are
|
|
forever deaf and blind and lost,
|
|
Our prayer of thanks.
|
|
|
|
God,
|
|
The game is all your way, the secrets and the signals and
|
|
the system; and so for the break of the game and
|
|
the first play and the last.
|
|
Our prayer of thanks.
|
|
|
|
FOGS AND FIRES
|
|
|
|
AT A WINDOW
|
|
|
|
GIVE me hunger,
|
|
O you gods that sit and give
|
|
The world its orders.
|
|
Give me hunger, pain and want,
|
|
Shut me out with shame and failure
|
|
From your doors of gold and fame,
|
|
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!
|
|
|
|
But leave me a little love,
|
|
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
|
|
A hand to touch me in the dark room
|
|
Breaking the long loneliness.
|
|
In the dusk of day-shapes
|
|
Blurring the sunset,
|
|
One little wandering, western star
|
|
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
|
|
Let me go to the window,
|
|
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
|
|
And wait and know the coming
|
|
Of a little love.
|
|
|
|
UNDER THE HARVEST MOON
|
|
|
|
UNDER the harvest moon,
|
|
When the soft silver
|
|
Drips shimmering
|
|
Over the garden nights,
|
|
Death, the gray mocker,
|
|
Comes and whispers to you
|
|
As a beautiful friend
|
|
Who remembers.
|
|
|
|
Under the summer roses
|
|
When the flagrant crimson
|
|
Lurks in the dusk
|
|
Of the wild red leaves,
|
|
Love, with little hands,
|
|
Comes and touches you
|
|
With a thousand memories,
|
|
And asks you
|
|
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
|
|
|
|
THE GREAT HUNT
|
|
|
|
I CANNOT tell you now;
|
|
When the wind's drive and whirl
|
|
Blow me along no longer,
|
|
And the wind's a whisper at last--
|
|
Maybe I'll tell you then--
|
|
some other time.
|
|
|
|
When the rose's flash to the sunset
|
|
Reels to the rack and the twist,
|
|
And the rose is a red bygone,
|
|
When the face I love is going
|
|
And the gate to the end shall clang,
|
|
And it's no use to beckon or say, "So long"--
|
|
Maybe I'll tell you then--
|
|
some other time.
|
|
|
|
I never knew any more beautiful than you:
|
|
I have hunted you under my thoughts,
|
|
I have broken down under the wind
|
|
And into the roses looking for you.
|
|
I shall never find any
|
|
greater than you.
|
|
|
|
MONOTONE
|
|
|
|
THE monotone of the rain is beautiful,
|
|
And the sudden rise and slow relapse
|
|
Of the long multitudinous rain.
|
|
|
|
The sun on the hills is beautiful,
|
|
Or a captured sunset sea-flung,
|
|
Bannered with fire and gold.
|
|
|
|
A face I know is beautiful--
|
|
With fire and gold of sky and sea,
|
|
And the peace of long warm rain.
|
|
|
|
JOY
|
|
|
|
LET a joy keep you.
|
|
Reach out your hands
|
|
And take it when it runs by,
|
|
As the Apache dancer
|
|
Clutches his woman.
|
|
I have seen them
|
|
Live long and laugh loud,
|
|
Sent on singing, singing,
|
|
Smashed to the heart
|
|
Under the ribs
|
|
With a terrible love.
|
|
Joy always,
|
|
Joy everywhere--
|
|
Let joy kill you!
|
|
Keep away from the little deaths.
|
|
|
|
SHIRT
|
|
|
|
I REMEMBER once I ran after you and tagged the fluttering
|
|
shirt of you in the wind.
|
|
Once many days ago I drank a glassful of something and
|
|
the picture of you shivered and slid on top of the
|
|
stuff.
|
|
And again it was nobody else but you I heard in the
|
|
singing voice of a careless humming woman.
|
|
One night when I sat with chums telling stories at a
|
|
bonfire flickering red embers, in a language its own
|
|
talking to a spread of white stars:
|
|
It was you that slunk laughing
|
|
in the clumsy staggering shadows.
|
|
Broken answers of remembrance let me know you are
|
|
alive with a peering phantom face behind a doorway
|
|
somewhere in the city's push and fury
|
|
Or under a pack of moss and leaves waiting in silence
|
|
under a twist of oaken arms ready as ever to run
|
|
away again when I tag the fluttering shirt of you.
|
|
|
|
AZTEC
|
|
|
|
YOU came from the Aztecs
|
|
With a copper on your fore-arms
|
|
Tawnier than a sunset
|
|
Saying good-by to an even river.
|
|
|
|
And I said, you remember,
|
|
Those fore-arms of yours
|
|
Were finer than bronzes
|
|
And you were glad.
|
|
|
|
It was tears
|
|
And a path west
|
|
and a home-going
|
|
when I asked
|
|
Why there were scars of worn gold
|
|
Where a man's ring was fixed once
|
|
On your third finger.
|
|
And I call you
|
|
To come back
|
|
before the days are longer.
|
|
|
|
TWO
|
|
|
|
MEMORY of you is . . . a blue spear of flower.
|
|
I cannot remember the name of it.
|
|
Alongside a bold dripping poppy is fire and silk.
|
|
And they cover you.
|
|
|
|
BACK YARD
|
|
|
|
SHINE on, O moon of summer.
|
|
Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,
|
|
All silver under your rain to-night.
|
|
|
|
An Italian boy is sending songs to you to-night from an
|
|
accordion.
|
|
A Polish boy is out with his best girl; they marry next
|
|
month; to-night they are throwing you kisses.
|
|
|
|
An old man next door is dreaming over a sheen that sits
|
|
in a cherry tree in his back yard.
|
|
|
|
The clocks say I must go--I stay here sitting on the
|
|
back porch drinking white thoughts you rain down.
|
|
|
|
Shine on, O moon,
|
|
Shake out more and more silver changes.
|
|
|
|
ON THE BREAKWATER
|
|
|
|
ON the breakwater in the summer dark, a man and a
|
|
girl are sitting,
|
|
She across his knee and they are looking face into face
|
|
Talking to each other without words, singing rythms in
|
|
silence to each other.
|
|
|
|
A funnel of white ranges the blue dusk from an out-
|
|
going boat,
|
|
Playing its searchlight, puzzled, abrupt, over a streak of
|
|
green,
|
|
And two on the breakwater keep their silence, she on his
|
|
knee.
|
|
|
|
MASK
|
|
|
|
FLING your red scarf faster and faster, dancer.
|
|
It is summer and the sun loves a million green leaves,
|
|
masses of green.
|
|
Your red scarf flashes across them calling and a-calling.
|
|
The silk and flare of it is a great soprano leading a
|
|
chorus
|
|
Carried along in a rouse of voices reaching for the heart
|
|
of the world.
|
|
Your toes are singing to meet the song of your arms:
|
|
|
|
Let the red scarf go swifter.
|
|
Summer and the sun command you.
|
|
|
|
PEARL FOG
|
|
|
|
OPEN the door now.
|
|
Go roll up the collar of your coat
|
|
To walk in the changing scarf of mist.
|
|
|
|
Tell your sins here to the pearl fog
|
|
And know for once a deepening night
|
|
Strange as the half-meanings
|
|
Alurk in a wise woman's mousey eyes.
|
|
|
|
Yes, tell your sins
|
|
And know how careless a pearl fog is
|
|
Of the laws you have broken.
|
|
|
|
I SANG
|
|
|
|
I SANG to you and the moon
|
|
But only the moon remembers.
|
|
I sang
|
|
O reckless free-hearted
|
|
free-throated rythms,
|
|
Even the moon remembers them
|
|
And is kind to me.
|
|
|
|
FOLLIES
|
|
|
|
SHAKEN,
|
|
The blossoms of lilac,
|
|
And shattered,
|
|
The atoms of purple.
|
|
Green dip the leaves,
|
|
Darker the bark,
|
|
Longer the shadows.
|
|
|
|
Sheer lines of poplar
|
|
Shimmer with masses of silver
|
|
And down in a garden old with years
|
|
And broken walls of ruin and story,
|
|
Roses rise with red rain-memories.
|
|
May!
|
|
In the open world
|
|
The sun comes and finds your face,
|
|
Remembering all.
|
|
|
|
JUNE
|
|
|
|
PAULA is digging and shaping the loam of a salvia,
|
|
Scarlet Chinese talker of summer.
|
|
Two petals of crabapple blossom blow fallen in Paula's
|
|
hair,
|
|
And fluff of white from a cottonwood.
|
|
|
|
NOCTURNE IN A DESERTED
|
|
BRICKYARD
|
|
|
|
STUFF of the moon
|
|
Runs on the lapping sand
|
|
Out to the longest shadows.
|
|
Under the curving willows,
|
|
And round the creep of the wave line,
|
|
Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters
|
|
Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.
|
|
|
|
HYDRANGEAS
|
|
|
|
DRAGOONS, I tell you the white hydrangeas
|
|
turn rust and go soon.
|
|
Already mid September a line of brown runs
|
|
over them.
|
|
One sunset after another tracks the faces, the
|
|
petals.
|
|
Waiting, they look over the fence for what
|
|
way they go.
|
|
|
|
THEME IN YELLOW
|
|
|
|
I SPOT the hills
|
|
With yellow balls in autumn.
|
|
I light the prairie cornfields
|
|
Orange and tawny gold clusters
|
|
And I am called pumpkins.
|
|
On the last of October
|
|
When dusk is fallen
|
|
Children join hands
|
|
And circle round me
|
|
Singing ghost songs
|
|
And love to the harvest moon;
|
|
I am a jack-o'-lantern
|
|
With terrible teeth
|
|
And the children know
|
|
I am fooling.
|
|
|
|
BETWEEN TWO HILLS
|
|
|
|
BETWEEN two hills
|
|
The old town stands.
|
|
The houses loom
|
|
And the roofs and trees
|
|
And the dusk and the dark,
|
|
The damp and the dew
|
|
Are there.
|
|
|
|
The prayers are said
|
|
And the people rest
|
|
For sleep is there
|
|
And the touch of dreams
|
|
Is over all.
|
|
|
|
LAST ANSWERS
|
|
|
|
I WROTE a poem on the mist
|
|
And a woman asked me what I meant by it.
|
|
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,
|
|
how pearl and gray of it mix and reel,
|
|
And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening
|
|
into points of mystery quivering with color.
|
|
|
|
I answered:
|
|
The whole world was mist once long ago and some day
|
|
it will all go back to mist,
|
|
Our skulls and lungs are more water than bone and
|
|
tissue
|
|
And all poets love dust and mist because all the last
|
|
answers
|
|
Go running back to dust and mist.
|
|
|
|
WINDOW
|
|
|
|
NIGHT from a railroad car window
|
|
Is a great, dark, soft thing
|
|
Broken across with slashes of light.
|
|
|
|
YOUNG SEA
|
|
|
|
THE sea is never still.
|
|
It pounds on the shore
|
|
Restless as a young heart,
|
|
Hunting.
|
|
|
|
The sea speaks
|
|
And only the stormy hearts
|
|
Know what it says:
|
|
It is the face
|
|
of a rough mother speaking.
|
|
|
|
The sea is young.
|
|
One storm cleans all the hoar
|
|
And loosens the age of it.
|
|
I hear it laughing, reckless.
|
|
|
|
They love the sea,
|
|
Men who ride on it
|
|
And know they will die
|
|
Under the salt of it
|
|
|
|
Let only the young come,
|
|
Says the sea.
|
|
|
|
Let them kiss my face
|
|
And hear me.
|
|
I am the last word
|
|
And I tell
|
|
Where storms and stars come from.
|
|
|
|
BONES
|
|
|
|
SLING me under the sea.
|
|
Pack me down in the salt and wet.
|
|
No farmer's plow shall touch my bones.
|
|
No Hamlet hold my jaws and speak
|
|
How jokes are gone and empty is my mouth.
|
|
Long, green-eyed scavengers shall pick my eyes,
|
|
Purple fish play hide-and-seek,
|
|
And I shall be song of thunder, crash of sea,
|
|
Down on the floors of salt and wet.
|
|
Sling me . . . under the sea.
|
|
|
|
PALS
|
|
|
|
TAKE a hold now
|
|
On the silver handles here,
|
|
Six silver handles,
|
|
One for each of his old pals.
|
|
|
|
Take hold
|
|
And lift him down the stairs,
|
|
Put him on the rollers
|
|
Over the floor of the hearse.
|
|
|
|
Take him on the last haul,
|
|
To the cold straight house,
|
|
The level even house,
|
|
To the last house of all.
|
|
|
|
The dead say nothing
|
|
And the dead know much
|
|
And the dead hold under their tongues
|
|
A locked-up story.
|
|
|
|
CHILD
|
|
|
|
THE young child, Christ, is straight and wise
|
|
And asks questions of the old men, questions
|
|
Found under running water for all children
|
|
And found under shadows thrown on still waters
|
|
By tall trees looking downward, old and gnarled.
|
|
Found to the eyes of children alone, untold,
|
|
Singing a low song in the loneliness.
|
|
And the young child, Christ, goes on asking
|
|
And the old men answer nothing and only know love
|
|
For the young child. Christ, straight and wise.
|
|
|
|
POPPIES
|
|
|
|
SHE loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in.
|
|
In a loose white gown she walks
|
|
and a new child tugs at cords in her body.
|
|
Her head to the west at evening when the dew is creeping,
|
|
A shudder of gladness runs in her bones and torsal fiber:
|
|
She loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in.
|
|
|
|
CHILD MOON
|
|
|
|
THE child's wonder
|
|
At the old moon
|
|
Comes back nightly.
|
|
She points her finger
|
|
To the far silent yellow thing
|
|
Shining through the branches
|
|
Filtering on the leaves a golden sand,
|
|
Crying with her little tongue, "See the moon!"
|
|
And in her bed fading to sleep
|
|
With babblings of the moon on her little mouth.
|
|
|
|
MARGARET
|
|
|
|
MANY birds and the beating of wings
|
|
Make a flinging reckless hum
|
|
In the early morning at the rocks
|
|
Above the blue pool
|
|
Where the gray shadows swim lazy.
|
|
|
|
In your blue eyes, O reckless child,
|
|
I saw today many little wild wishes,
|
|
Eager as the great morning.
|
|
|
|
SHADOWS
|
|
|
|
POEMS DONE ON A LATE NIGHT CAR
|
|
|
|
I. CHICKENS
|
|
|
|
I AM The Great White Way of the city:
|
|
When you ask what is my desire, I answer:
|
|
"Girls fresh as country wild flowers,
|
|
With young faces tired of the cows and barns,
|
|
Eager in their eyes as the dawn to find my mysteries,
|
|
Slender supple girls with shapely legs,
|
|
Lure in the arch of their little shoulders
|
|
And wisdom from the prairies to cry only softly at
|
|
the ashes of my mysteries."
|
|
|
|
II. USED UP
|
|
|
|
Lines based on certain regrets that come with rumination
|
|
upon the painted faces of women on
|
|
North Clark Street, Chicago
|
|
|
|
Roses,
|
|
Red roses,
|
|
Crushed
|
|
In the rain and wind
|
|
Like mouths of women
|
|
Beaten by the fists of
|
|
Men using them.
|
|
O little roses
|
|
And broken leaves
|
|
And petal wisps:
|
|
You that so flung your crimson
|
|
To the sun
|
|
Only yesterday.
|
|
|
|
III. HOME
|
|
|
|
Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
|
|
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
|
|
To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry
|
|
in the darkness.
|
|
|
|
IT IS MUCH
|
|
|
|
WOMEN of night life amid the lights
|
|
Where the line of your full, round throats
|
|
Matches in gleam the glint of your eyes
|
|
And the ring of your heart-deep laughter:
|
|
It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.
|
|
|
|
Women of night life along the shadows,
|
|
Lean at your throats and skulking the walls,
|
|
Gaunt as a bitch worn to the bone,
|
|
Under the paint of your smiling faces:
|
|
It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.
|
|
|
|
TRAFFICKER
|
|
|
|
AMONG the shadows where two streets cross,
|
|
A woman lurks in the dark and waits
|
|
To move on when a policeman heaves in view.
|
|
Smiling a broken smile from a face
|
|
Painted over haggard bones and desperate eyes,
|
|
All night she offers passers-by what they will
|
|
Of her beauty wasted, body faded, claims gone,
|
|
And no takers.
|
|
|
|
HARRISON STREET COURT
|
|
|
|
I HEARD a woman's lips
|
|
Speaking to a companion
|
|
Say these words:
|
|
|
|
"A woman what hustles
|
|
Never keeps nothin'
|
|
For all her hustlin'.
|
|
Somebody always gets
|
|
What she goes on the street for.
|
|
If it ain't a pimp
|
|
It's a bull what gets it.
|
|
I been hustlin' now
|
|
Till I ain't much good any more.
|
|
I got nothin' to show for it.
|
|
Some man got it all,
|
|
Every night's hustlin' I ever did."
|
|
|
|
SOILED DOVE
|
|
|
|
LET us be honest; the lady was not a harlot until she
|
|
married a corporation lawyer who picked her from
|
|
a Ziegfeld chorus.
|
|
Before then she never took anybody's money and paid
|
|
for her silk stockings out of what she earned singing
|
|
and dancing.
|
|
She loved one man and he loved six women and the
|
|
game was changing her looks, calling for more and
|
|
more massage money and high coin for the beauty
|
|
doctors.
|
|
Now she drives a long, underslung motor car all by herself,
|
|
reads in the day's papers what her husband is
|
|
doing to the inter-state commerce commission, requires
|
|
a larger corsage from year to year, and wonders
|
|
sometimes how one man is coming along with
|
|
six women.
|
|
|
|
JUNGHEIMER'S
|
|
|
|
IN western fields of corn and northern timber lands,
|
|
They talk about me, a saloon with a soul,
|
|
The soft red lights, the long curving bar,
|
|
The leather seats and dim corners,
|
|
Tall brass spittoons, a nigger cutting ham,
|
|
And the painting of a woman half-dressed thrown reckless
|
|
across a bed after a night of booze and riots.
|
|
|
|
GONE
|
|
|
|
EVERYBODY loved Chick Lorimer in our town.
|
|
Far off
|
|
Everybody loved her.
|
|
So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold
|
|
On a dream she wants.
|
|
Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went.
|
|
Nobody knows why she packed her trunk. . a few
|
|
old things
|
|
And is gone,
|
|
Gone with her little chin
|
|
Thrust ahead of her
|
|
And her soft hair blowing careless
|
|
From under a wide hat,
|
|
Dancer, singer, a laughing passionate lover.
|
|
|
|
Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?
|
|
Were there five men or fifty with aching hearts?
|
|
Everybody loved Chick Lorimer.
|
|
Nobody knows where she's gone.
|
|
|
|
OTHER DAYS
|
|
(1900-1910)
|
|
|
|
DREAMS IN THE DUSK
|
|
|
|
DREAMS in the dusk,
|
|
Only dreams closing the day
|
|
And with the day's close going back
|
|
To the gray things, the dark things,
|
|
The far, deep things of dreamland.
|
|
|
|
Dreams, only dreams in the dusk,
|
|
Only the old remembered pictures
|
|
Of lost days when the day's loss
|
|
Wrote in tears the heart's loss.
|
|
|
|
Tears and loss and broken dreams
|
|
May find your heart at dusk.
|
|
|
|
DOCKS
|
|
|
|
STROLLING along
|
|
By the teeming docks,
|
|
I watch the ships put out.
|
|
Black ships that heave and lunge
|
|
And move like mastodons
|
|
Arising from lethargic sleep.
|
|
|
|
The fathomed harbor
|
|
Calls them not nor dares
|
|
Them to a strain of action,
|
|
But outward, on and outward,
|
|
Sounding low-reverberating calls,
|
|
Shaggy in the half-lit distance,
|
|
They pass the pointed headland,
|
|
View the wide, far-lifting wilderness
|
|
And leap with cumulative speed
|
|
To test the challenge of the sea.
|
|
|
|
Plunging,
|
|
Doggedly onward plunging,
|
|
Into salt and mist and foam and sun.
|
|
|
|
ALL DAY LONG
|
|
|
|
ALL day long in fog and wind,
|
|
The waves have flung their beating crests
|
|
Against the palisades of adamant.
|
|
My boy, he went to sea, long and long ago,
|
|
Curls of brown were slipping underneath his cap,
|
|
He looked at me from blue and steely eyes;
|
|
Natty, straight and true, he stepped away,
|
|
My boy, he went to sea.
|
|
All day long in fog and wind,
|
|
The waves have flung their beating crests
|
|
Against the palisades of adamant.
|
|
|
|
WAITING
|
|
|
|
TODAY I will let the old boat stand
|
|
Where the sweep of the harbor tide comes in
|
|
To the pulse of a far, deep-steady sway.
|
|
And I will rest and dream and sit on the deck
|
|
Watching the world go by
|
|
And take my pay for many hard days gone I remember.
|
|
|
|
I will choose what clouds I like
|
|
In the great white fleets that wander the blue
|
|
As I lie on my back or loaf at the rail.
|
|
And I will listen as the veering winds kiss me and fold me
|
|
And put on my brow the touch of the world's great will.
|
|
|
|
Daybreak will hear the heart of the boat beat,
|
|
Engine throb and piston play
|
|
In the quiver and leap at call of life.
|
|
To-morrow we move in the gaps and heights
|
|
On changing floors of unlevel seas
|
|
And no man shall stop us and no man follow
|
|
For ours is the quest of an unknown shore
|
|
And we are husky and lusty and shouting-gay.
|
|
|
|
FROM THE SHORE
|
|
|
|
A LONE gray bird,
|
|
Dim-dipping, far-flying,
|
|
Alone in the shadows and grandeurs and tumults
|
|
Of night and the sea
|
|
And the stars and storms.
|
|
|
|
Out over the darkness it wavers and hovers,
|
|
Out into the gloom it swings and batters,
|
|
Out into the wind and the rain and the vast,
|
|
Out into the pit of a great black world,
|
|
Where fogs are at battle, sky-driven, sea-blown,
|
|
Love of mist and rapture of flight,
|
|
Glories of chance and hazards of death
|
|
On its eager and palpitant wings.
|
|
|
|
Out into the deep of the great dark world,
|
|
Beyond the long borders where foam and drift
|
|
Of the sundering waves are lost and gone
|
|
On the tides that plunge and rear and crumble.
|
|
|
|
UPLANDS IN MAY
|
|
|
|
WONDER as of old things
|
|
Fresh and fair come back
|
|
Hangs over pasture and road.
|
|
Lush in the lowland grasses rise
|
|
And upland beckons to upland.
|
|
The great strong hills are humble.
|
|
|
|
DREAM GIRL
|
|
|
|
YOU will come one day in a waver of love,
|
|
Tender as dew, impetuous as rain,
|
|
The tan of the sun will be on your skin,
|
|
The purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech,
|
|
You will pose with a hill-flower grace.
|
|
|
|
You will come, with your slim, expressive arms,
|
|
A poise of the head no sculptor has caught
|
|
And nuances spoken with shoulder and neck,
|
|
Your face in a pass-and-repass of moods
|
|
As many as skies in delicate change
|
|
Of cloud and blue and flimmering sun.
|
|
|
|
Yet,
|
|
You may not come, O girl of a dream,
|
|
We may but pass as the world goes by
|
|
And take from a look of eyes into eyes,
|
|
A film of hope and a memoried day.
|
|
|
|
PLOWBOY
|
|
|
|
AFTER the last red sunset glimmer,
|
|
Black on the line of a low hill rise,
|
|
Formed into moving shadows, I saw
|
|
A plowboy and two horses lined against the gray,
|
|
Plowing in the dusk the last furrow.
|
|
The turf had a gleam of brown,
|
|
And smell of soil was in the air,
|
|
And, cool and moist, a haze of April.
|
|
|
|
I shall remember you long,
|
|
Plowboy and horses against the sky in shadow.
|
|
I shall remember you and the picture
|
|
You made for me,
|
|
Turning the turf in the dusk
|
|
And haze of an April gloaming.
|
|
|
|
BROADWAY
|
|
|
|
I SHALL never forget you, Broadway
|
|
Your golden and calling lights.
|
|
|
|
I'll remember you long,
|
|
Tall-walled river of rush and play.
|
|
|
|
Hearts that know you hate you
|
|
And lips that have given you laughter
|
|
Have gone to their ashes of life and its roses,
|
|
Cursing the dreams that were lost
|
|
In the dust of your harsh and trampled stones.
|
|
|
|
OLD WOMAN
|
|
|
|
THE owl-car clatters along, dogged by the echo
|
|
From building and battered paving-stone.
|
|
The headlight scoffs at the mist,
|
|
And fixes its yellow rays in the cold slow rain;
|
|
Against a pane I press my forehead
|
|
And drowsily look on the walls and sidewalks.
|
|
|
|
The headlight finds the way
|
|
And life is gone from the wet and the welter--
|
|
Only an old woman, bloated, disheveled and bleared.
|
|
Far-wandered waif of other days,
|
|
Huddles for sleep in a doorway,
|
|
Homeless.
|
|
|
|
NOON HOUR
|
|
|
|
SHE sits in the dust at the walls
|
|
And makes cigars,
|
|
Bending at the bench
|
|
With fingers wage-anxious,
|
|
Changing her sweat for the day's pay.
|
|
|
|
Now the noon hour has come,
|
|
And she leans with her bare arms
|
|
On the window-sill over the river,
|
|
Leans and feels at her throat
|
|
Cool-moving things out of the free open ways:
|
|
|
|
At her throat and eyes and nostrils
|
|
The touch and the blowing cool
|
|
Of great free ways beyond the walls.
|
|
|
|
'BOES
|
|
|
|
I WAITED today for a freight train to pass.
|
|
Cattle cars with steers butting their horns against the
|
|
bars, went by.
|
|
And a half a dozen hoboes stood on bumpers between
|
|
cars.
|
|
Well, the cattle are respectable, I thought.
|
|
Every steer has its transportation paid for by the farmer
|
|
sending it to market,
|
|
While the hoboes are law-breakers in riding a railroad
|
|
train without a ticket.
|
|
It reminded me of ten days I spent in the Allegheny
|
|
County jail in Pittsburgh.
|
|
I got ten days even though I was a veteran of the
|
|
Spanish-American war.
|
|
Cooped in the same cell with me was an old man, a
|
|
bricklayer and a booze-fighter.
|
|
But it just happened he, too, was a veteran soldier, and
|
|
he had fought to preserve the Union and free the
|
|
niggers.
|
|
We were three in all, the other being a Lithuanian who
|
|
got drunk on pay day at the steel works and got to
|
|
fighting a policeman;
|
|
All the clothes he had was a shirt, pants and shoes--
|
|
somebody got his hat and coat and what money he
|
|
had left over when he got drunk.
|
|
|
|
UNDER A TELEPHONE POLE
|
|
|
|
I AM a copper wire slung in the air,
|
|
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
|
|
Night and day I keep singing--humming and thrumming:
|
|
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the
|
|
tears, the work and want,
|
|
Death and laughter of men and women passing through
|
|
me, carrier of your speech,
|
|
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the
|
|
shine drying,
|
|
A copper wire.
|
|
|
|
I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB
|
|
|
|
I AM the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
|
|
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
|
|
done through me?
|
|
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
|
|
world's food and clothes.
|
|
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
|
|
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
|
|
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
|
|
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
|
|
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
|
|
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
|
|
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
|
|
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
|
|
forget.
|
|
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
|
|
drops for history to remember. Then--I forget.
|
|
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
|
|
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
|
|
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
|
|
a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the world
|
|
say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a
|
|
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
|
|
The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.
|
|
|
|
GOVERNMENT
|
|
|
|
THE Government--I heard about the Government and
|
|
I went out to find it. I said I would look closely at
|
|
it when I saw it.
|
|
Then I saw a policeman dragging a drunken man to
|
|
the callaboose. It was the Government in action.
|
|
I saw a ward alderman slip into an office one morning
|
|
and talk with a judge. Later in the day the judge
|
|
dismissed a case against a pickpocket who was a
|
|
live ward worker for the alderman. Again I saw
|
|
this was the Government, doing things.
|
|
I saw militiamen level their rifles at a crowd of
|
|
workingmen who were trying to get other workingmen
|
|
to stay away from a shop where there was a strike
|
|
on. Government in action.
|
|
|
|
Everywhere I saw that Government is a thing made of
|
|
men, that Government has blood and bones, it is
|
|
many mouths whispering into many ears, sending
|
|
telegrams, aiming rifles, writing orders, saying
|
|
"yes" and "no."
|
|
|
|
Government dies as the men who form it die and are laid
|
|
away in their graves and the new Government that
|
|
comes after is human, made of heartbeats of blood,
|
|
ambitions, lusts, and money running through it all,
|
|
money paid and money taken, and money covered
|
|
up and spoken of with hushed voices.
|
|
A Government is just as secret and mysterious and sensitive
|
|
as any human sinner carrying a load of germs,
|
|
traditions and corpuscles handed down from
|
|
fathers and mothers away back.
|
|
|
|
LANGUAGES
|
|
|
|
THERE are no handles upon a language
|
|
Whereby men take hold of it
|
|
And mark it with signs for its remembrance.
|
|
It is a river, this language,
|
|
Once in a thousand years
|
|
Breaking a new course
|
|
Changing its way to the ocean.
|
|
It is mountain effluvia
|
|
Moving to valleys
|
|
And from nation to nation
|
|
Crossing borders and mixing.
|
|
Languages die like rivers.
|
|
Words wrapped round your tongue today
|
|
And broken to shape of thought
|
|
Between your teeth and lips speaking
|
|
Now and today
|
|
Shall be faded hieroglyphics
|
|
Ten thousand years from now.
|
|
Sing--and singing--remember
|
|
Your song dies and changes
|
|
And is not here to-morrow
|
|
Any more than the wind
|
|
Blowing ten thousand years ago.
|
|
|
|
LETTERS TO DEAD IMAGISTS
|
|
|
|
EMILY DICKINSON:
|
|
You gave us the bumble bee who has a soul,
|
|
The everlasting traveler among the hollyhocks,
|
|
And how God plays around a back yard garden.
|
|
|
|
STEVIE CRANE:
|
|
War is kind and we never knew the kindness of war till
|
|
you came;
|
|
Nor the black riders and clashes of spear and shield out
|
|
of the sea,
|
|
Nor the mumblings and shots that rise from dreams on
|
|
call.
|
|
|
|
SHEEP
|
|
|
|
Thousands of sheep, soft-footed, black-nosed sheep--
|
|
one by one going up the hill and over the fence--one by
|
|
one four-footed pattering up and over--one by one wiggling
|
|
their stub tails as they take the short jump and go
|
|
over--one by one silently unless for the multitudinous
|
|
drumming of their hoofs as they move on and go over--
|
|
thousands and thousands of them in the grey haze of
|
|
evening just after sundown--one by one slanting in a
|
|
long line to pass over the hill--
|
|
|
|
I am the slow, long-legged Sleepyman and I love you
|
|
sheep in Persia, California, Argentine, Australia, or
|
|
Spain--you are the thoughts that help me when I, the
|
|
Sleepyman, lay my hands on the eyelids of the children
|
|
of the world at eight o'clock every night--you thousands
|
|
and thousands of sheep in a procession of dusk making
|
|
an endless multitudinous drumming on the hills with
|
|
your hoofs.
|
|
|
|
THE RED SON
|
|
|
|
I LOVE your faces I saw the many years
|
|
I drank your milk and filled my mouth
|
|
With your home talk, slept in your house
|
|
And was one of you.
|
|
But a fire burns in my heart.
|
|
Under the ribs where pulses thud
|
|
And flitting between bones of skull
|
|
Is the push, the endless mysterious command,
|
|
Saying:
|
|
"I leave you behind--
|
|
You for the little hills and the years all alike,
|
|
You with your patient cows and old houses
|
|
Protected from the rain,
|
|
I am going away and I never come back to you;
|
|
Crags and high rough places call me,
|
|
Great places of death
|
|
Where men go empty handed
|
|
And pass over smiling
|
|
To the star-drift on the horizon rim.
|
|
My last whisper shall be alone, unknown;
|
|
I shall go to the city and fight against it,
|
|
And make it give me passwords
|
|
Of luck and love, women worth dying for,
|
|
And money.
|
|
I go where you wist not of
|
|
Nor I nor any man nor woman.
|
|
I only know I go to storms
|
|
Grappling against things wet and naked."
|
|
There is no pity of it and no blame.
|
|
None of us is in the wrong.
|
|
After all it is only this:
|
|
You for the little hills and I go away.
|
|
|
|
THE MIST
|
|
|
|
I AM the mist, the impalpable mist,
|
|
Back of the thing you seek.
|
|
My arms are long,
|
|
Long as the reach of time and space.
|
|
|
|
Some toil and toil, believing,
|
|
Looking now and again on my face,
|
|
Catching a vital, olden glory.
|
|
|
|
But no one passes me,
|
|
I tangle and snare them all.
|
|
I am the cause of the Sphinx,
|
|
The voiceless, baffled, patient Sphinx.
|
|
|
|
I was at the first of things,
|
|
I will be at the last.
|
|
I am the primal mist
|
|
And no man passes me;
|
|
My long impalpable arms
|
|
Bar them all.
|
|
|
|
THE JUNK MAN
|
|
|
|
I AM glad God saw Death
|
|
And gave Death a job taking care of all who are tired
|
|
of living:
|
|
|
|
When all the wheels in a clock are worn and slow and
|
|
the connections loose
|
|
And the clock goes on ticking and telling the wrong time
|
|
from hour to hour
|
|
And people around the house joke about what a bum
|
|
clock it is,
|
|
How glad the clock is when the big Junk Man drives
|
|
his wagon
|
|
Up to the house and puts his arms around the clock and
|
|
says:
|
|
"You don't belong here,
|
|
You gotta come
|
|
Along with me,"
|
|
How glad the clock is then, when it feels the arms of the
|
|
Junk Man close around it and carry it away.
|
|
|
|
SILVER NAILS
|
|
|
|
A MAN was crucified. He came to the city a stranger,
|
|
was accused, and nailed to a cross. He lingered hanging.
|
|
Laughed at the crowd. "The nails are iron," he
|
|
said, "You are cheap. In my country when we crucify
|
|
we use silver nails. . ." So he went jeering. They
|
|
did not understand him at first. Later they talked about
|
|
him in changed voices in the saloons, bowling alleys, and
|
|
churches. It came over them every man is crucified
|
|
only once in his life and the law of humanity dictates
|
|
silver nails be used for the job. A statue was erected
|
|
to him in a public square. Not having gathered his
|
|
name when he was among them, they wrote him as John
|
|
Silvernail on the statue.
|
|
|
|
GYPSY
|
|
|
|
I ASKED a gypsy pal
|
|
To imitate an old image
|
|
And speak old wisdom.
|
|
She drew in her chin,
|
|
Made her neck and head
|
|
The top piece of a Nile obelisk
|
|
and said:
|
|
Snatch off the gag from thy mouth, child,
|
|
And be free to keep silence.
|
|
Tell no man anything for no man listens,
|
|
Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.
|
|
|
|
[End.]
|
|
.
|