Philosophy


                 

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?
Ho




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 

 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.