Escritas

Poems List

Two Neighbors

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.
👁️ 340

Troths

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.
👁️ 270

To Certain Journeymen

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.
👁️ 328

To A Dead Man

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.
👁️ 295

Threes

Threes


I was a boy when I heard three red words
a thousand Frenchmen died in the streets
for: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--I asked
why men die for words.


I was older; men with mustaches, sideburns,
lilacs, told me the high golden words are:
Mother, Home, and Heaven--other older men with
face decorations said: God, Duty, Immortality
--they sang these threes slow from deep lungs.


Years ticked off their say-so on the great clocks
of doom and damnation, soup, and nuts: meteors flashed
their say-so: and out of great Russia came three
dusky syllables workmen took guns and went out to die
for: Bread, Peace, Land.


And I met a marine of the U.S.A., a leatherneck with a girl on his knee
for a memory in ports circling the earth and he said: Tell me how to say
three things and I always get by--gimme a plate of ham and eggs--how
much--and--do you love me, kid?
👁️ 327

They All Want to Play Hamlet

They All Want to Play Hamlet

They all want to play Hamlet.
They have not exactly seen their fathers killed
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,
Nor an Ophelia lying with dust gagging the heart,
Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,
Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of flowers--O flowers, flowers slung
by a dancing girl--in the saddest play the inkfish, Shakespeare ever wrote;
Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad and to stand by
an open grave with a joker's skull in the hand and then to say over slow and over slow
wise, keen, beautiful words asking the heart that's breaking, breaking,
This is something that calls and calls to their blood.
They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be particular
about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.
👁️ 354

The Year

The Year

I


A storm of white petals,
Buds throwing open baby fists
Into hands of broad flowers.


II


Red roses running upward,
Clambering to the clutches of life
Soaked in crimson.


III


Rabbles of tattered leaves
Holding golden flimsy hopes
Against the tramplings
Into the pits and gullies.


IV


Hoarfrost and silence:
Only the muffling
Of winds dark and lonesome--
Great lullabies to the long sleepers.
👁️ 322

The Shovel Man

The Shovel Man

On the street
Slung on his shoulder is a handle half way across,
Tied in a big knot on the scoop of cast iron
Are the overalls faded from sun and rain in the ditches;
Spatter of dry clay sticking yellow on his left sleeve

And a flimsy shirt open at the throat,
I know him for a shovel man,
A dago working for a dollar six bits a day


And a dark-eyed woman in the old country dreams of
him for one of the world's ready men with a pair
of fresh lips and a kiss better than all the wild
grapes that ever grew in Tuscany.
👁️ 340

The Right To Grief

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.
👁️ 322

The Noon Hour

The 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.
👁️ 332

Comments (0)

ShareOn Facebook X Instagram
Log in ToPostComment

NoComments