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Passers-By

Passers-By


Passers-by,
Out of your many faces
Flash memories to me
Now at the day end
Away from the sidewalks
Where your shoe soles traveled
And your voices rose and blent
To form the city's afternoon roar
Hindering an old silence.


Passers-by,
I remember lean ones among you,
Throats in the clutch of a hope,
Lips written over with strivings,
Mouths that kiss only for love.
Records of great wishes slept with,
Held long
And prayed and toiled for. .


Yes,
Written on
Your mouths
And your throats
I read them
When you passed by.
👁️ 280

Our Prayer of Thanks

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.
👁️ 325

On the Way

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?
👁️ 344

Omaha

Omaha


Red barns and red heiffers spot the green
grass circles around Omaha--the farmers
haul tanks of cream and wagon-loads of
cheese.


Shale hogbacks across the river at Council
Bluffs--and shanties hang by an eyelash to
the hill slants back around Omaha.


A span of steel ties up the kin of Iowa and
Nebraska across the yellow, big-hoofed Missouri
River.


Omaha, the roughneck, feeds armies,
Eats and swears from a dirty face.
Omaha works to get the world a breakfast.
👁️ 292

Old Timers

Old Timers

I am an ancient reluctant conscript.


On the soup wagons of Xerxes I was a cleaner of pans.
On the march of Miltiades' phalanx I had a haft and head;
I had a bristling gleaming spear-handle.


Red-headed Cæsar picked me for a teamster.
He said, "Go to work, you Tuscan bastard,
Rome calls for a man who can drive horses."


The units of conquest led by Charles the Twelfth,
The whirling whimsical Napoleonic columns:
They saw me one of the horseshoers.


I trimmed the feet of a white horse Bonaparte swept the night stars with.


Lincoln said, "Get into the game; your nation takes you."
And I drove a wagon and team and I had my arm shot off
At Spottsylvania Court House.


I am an ancient reluctant conscript.
👁️ 381

Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard

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.
👁️ 326

Neighbors

Neighbors


On Forty-first Street
near Eighth Avenue
a frame house wobbles.


If houses went on crutches
this house would be
one of the cripples.


A sign on the house:
Church of the Living God
And Rescue Home for Orphan Children.


From a Greek coffee house
Across the street
A cabalistic jargon
Jabbers back.
And men at tables
Spill Peloponnesian syllables
And speak of shovels for street work.
And the new embankments of the Erie Railroad
At Painted Post, Horse's Head, Salamanca.
👁️ 318

Muckers

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.”
👁️ 361

Monosyllabic

Monosyllabic


Let me be monosyllabic to-day, O Lord.
Yesterday I loosed a snarl of words on a fool, on a child.
To-day, let me be monosyllabic . . . . a crony of old men who wash sunlight in their
fingers and enjoy slow-pacing clocks.
👁️ 370

Mill-Doors

Mill-Doors


You never come back.
I say good-by when I see you going in the doors,
The hopeless open doors that call and wait
And take you then for—how many cents a day?
How many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers?


I say good-by because I know they tap your wrists,
In the dark, in the silence, day by day,
And all the blood of you drop by drop,
And you are old before you are young.
You never come back.
👁️ 298

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