and-out, there a game fighter who will die
fighting.
20
Who shall speak for the people?
Who knows the works from A to Z
so he can say, “I know what the
people want”? Who is this phenom?
where did he come from?
When have the people been half as rotten
as what the panderers to the people
dangle before crowds?
When has the fiber of the people been as
shoddy as what is sold to the people
by cheaters?
What is it the panderers and cheaters of
the people play with and trade on?
The credulity of believers and hopers—and
when is a heart less of a heart because
of belief and hope?
What is the tremulous line between credulity
on the one side and on the other
the hypotheses and illusions of inventors,
discoverers, navigators who chart
their course by what they hope and
believe is beyond the horizon?
What is a stratosphere fourteen miles from
the earth or a sunken glass house on
the sea-bottom amid fish and featherstars
unless a bet that man can shove
on beyond yesterday’s record of man
the hoper, the believer?
How like a sublime sanctuary of human
credulity is that room where amid
tubes, globes and retorts they shoot
with heavy hearts of hydrogen and
batter with fire-strearns of power hoping
to smash the atom:
Who are these bipeds trying to take apart
the atom and isolate its electrons and
make it tell why it is what it is? Believers
and hopers.
Let the work of their fathers and elderbrothers
be cancelled this instant and
what would happen?
Nothing—only every tool, bus, car, light,
torch, bulb, print, film, instrument or
communication depending for its life
on electrodynamic power would stop
and stand dumb and silent.
21
Who knows the people, the migratory harvest hands and berry pickers, the loan shark victims, the installment house wolves,
The jugglers in sand and wood who smooth their hands along the mold that casts the frame of your motor-car engine,
The metal polishers, solderers, and paint spray hands who put the final finish on the car,
The riveters and bolt-catchers, the cowboys of the air in the big city, the cowhands of the Great Plains, the ex-convicts, the bellhops, redcaps, lavatory men—
The union organizer with his list of those ready to join and those hesitating, the secret paid informers who report every move toward organizing,
The house-to-house canvassers, the doorbell ringers, the good-moming-have-you-heard boys, the strike pickets, the strikebreakers, the hired sluggers, the ambulance crew, the ambulance chasers, the picture chasers, the meter readers, the oysterboat crews, the harborlight tenders—
who knows the people?
Who knows this from pit to peak? The people, yes.
22
The people is a lighted believer and
hoper—and this is to be held against
them?
The panderers and cheaters are to have
their way in trading on these lights
of the people?
Not always, no, not always, for the people
is a knower too.
With Johannson steel blocks the people
can measure itself as a knower
Knowing what it knows today with a deeper
knowing than ever
Knowing in millionths and billionths of
an inch
Knowing in the mystery of one automatic
machine expertly shaping for your eyes
another automatic machine
Knowing in traction, power-shafts, transmission,
twist drills, grinding, gears—
Knowing in the night air mail, the newsreel
flicker, the broadcasts from Tokio,
Shanghai, Bombay and Somaliland—
The people a knower whose knowing
grows by what it feeds on
The people wanting to know more, wanting.
The birds of the air and the fish of the sea
leave off where man begins.
23
“The kindest and gentlest here are the
murderers,” said the penitentiary warden.
“I killed the man because I loved him,”
said the woman the police took yesterday.
“I had such a good time,” said the woman leaving a movie theater
with tears in her eyes. “It was a swell picture.”
“A divorced man goes and marries the same kind of a woman he
is just rid of,” said the lawyer.
“Life is a gigantic fake,” read the farewell note of the highschool
boy who killed himself.
“I pick jurors with nonconvicting faces,”
said the lawyer who usually cleared his man.
“We earn and we earn and all that we earn goes into the grave,”
said the basement-dwelling mother who had lost six of her
eight children from the white plague.
“Don’t mourn for me but organize,” said the Utah I.W.W. before
a firing squad executed sentence of death on him, his last
words running: “Let her go!”
“Look out or you’ll be ready for one of these one-man bungalows
with silver handles,” laughed the traffic cop.
“Tie your hat to the saddle and let’s ride,”
yelled one in a five-gallon hat in Albuquerque.
“If I never see you again don’t think the tune long,” smiled an
old-timer in Wyoming moonlight.
On tiptoe and whispering so no one else could hear, a little girl at
Brownsville spoke into the ear of the chief executive of the
great State of Texas: “How does it feel to be Governor?”
Why when the stock crash came did the man in black silk pajamas
let himself headfirst off a fire escape down ten floors to
a stone sidewalk? His sixty million dollars had shrunk to ten
million and he didn’t see how he could get along.
“If she was a wicked witch she wouldn’t say so, she would be so
wicked she wouldn’t know it,” said little Anne.
“God will forgive me, it’s his line of business,”
said the dying German-Jewish poet in his garret.
The little girl saw her first troop parade and asked,
“What are those?”
“Soldiers.”
“What are soldiers?”
“They are for war. They fight and each tries to kill
as many of the other side as he can.”
The girl held still and studied.
“Do you know . . . I know something?”
“Yes, what is it you know?”
“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”
One of the early Chicago poets,
One of the slouching underslung Chicago poets,
Having only the savvy God gave him,
Lacking a gat, lacking brass knucks,
Having one lead pencil to spare, wrote:
“I am credulous about the destiny of man,
and I believe more than I can ever prove
of the future of the human race
and the importance of illusions,
the value of great expectations.
I would like to be in the same moment
an earthworm (which I am) and
a rider to the m
oon (which I am).”
24
Who shall speak for the people?
who has the answers?
where is the sure interpreter?
who knows what to say?
Who can write the music jazz-classical
smokestacks-geraniums hyacinths-biscuits
now whispering easy
now boom doom crashing angular
now tough monotonous tom tom
Who has enough split-seconds and slow sea-tides?
The ships of the sea and the mists of
night and the sheen of old battlefields
and the moon on the city
rubbish dumps belong to the people.
The crops this year, last and next year,
and the winds and frosts in many
orchards and tomato gardens, are
listed in the people’s acquaintance.
Horses and wagons, trucks and tractors,
from the shouting cities to the sleeping
prairies, from worn pavements
to mountain mule paths, the people
have strange possessions.
The plow and the hammer, the knife and
the shovel, the planting hoe and the
reaping sickle, everywhere these are
the people’s possessions by right of
use.
Their handles are smoothed to the grain
of the wood by the enclosing
thumbs and fingers of familiar
hands,
Maintenance-of-way men in a Tennessee
gang singing, “If I die a railroad
man put a pick and shovel at my
head and my feet and a nine-pound
hammer in my hand,”
Larry, the Kansas section boss, on his
dying bed asking for one last look at
the old hand-car,
His men saying in the coffin on his chest
he should by rights have the spike
maul, the gauge and the old claw-bar.
The early morning in the fields, the
brown thrush warbling and the imitations
of the catbird, the neverending
combat with pest and destroyer,
the chores of feeding and watching,
seedtime and harvest,
The clocking of the months toward a
birthing day, the newly dropped
calves and the finished steers loaded
in stock-cars for market, the gamble
on what we’ll get tomorrow for
what we put in today—
These are belongings of the people, dusty
with the dust of earth, merciless as
sudden hog cholera, hopeful as a
rainwashed hill of moonlit pines.
25
“You do what you must—this world and then the next—one world at a time.”
The grain gamblers and the price manipulators and the stockmarket players put their own twist on the text: In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread.
The day’s work in the factory, mill, mine—the whistle, the bell, the alarm clock, the timekeeper and the paycheck, your number on the assembly line, what the night shift says when the day shift comes—the blood of years paid out for finished products proclaimed on billboards yelling at highway travellers in green valleys—
These are daily program items, values of blood and mind in the everyday rituals of the people.
26
You can drum on immense drums
the monotonous daily motions of the people
taking from earth and air
their morsels of bread and love,
a carryover from yesterday into tomorrow.
You can blow on great brass horns
the awful clamors of war and revolution
when swarming anonymous shadowshapes
obliterate old names Big Names
and cross out what was
and offer what is on a fresh blank page.
27
In the folded and quiet yesterdays
Put down in the book of the past
Is a scrawl of scrawny thumbs
And a smudge of clutching fingers
And the breath of hanged men,
Of thieves and vagabonds,
Of killers saying welcome as an ax fell,
Of traitors cut in four pieces
And their bowels thrust over their faces
According to the ancient Anglo-Saxon
Formula for the crime of treason,
Of persons covered with human filth
In due exaction of a penalty,
Of ears clipped, noses slit, fingers chopped
For the identification of vagrants,
Of loiterers and wanderers seared
“with a hot iron in the breast the mark V,”
Of violence as a motive lying deep
As the weather changes of the sea,
Of gang wars, tong wars, civil tumults,
Industrial strife, international mass murders,
Of agitators outlawed to live on thistles,
Of thongs for holding plainspoken men,
Of thought and speech being held a crime,
And a woman burned for saying,
“I listen to my Voices and obey them,”
And a thinker locked into stone and iron
For saying, “The earth moves,”
And the pity of men learning by shocks,
By pain and practice,
By plunges and struggles in a bitter pool.
In the folded and quiet yesterdays
how many times has it happened?
The leaders of the people estimated as to price
And bought with bribes signed and delivered
Or waylaid and shot or meshed by perjurers
Or hunted and sent into hiding
Or taken and paraded in garments of dung,
Fire applied to their footsoles:
“Now will you talk?”
Their mouths basted with rubber hose:
“Now will you talk?”
Thrown into solitary, fed on slops, hung by thumbs,
Till the mention of that uprising is casual, so-so,
As though the next revolt breeds somewhere
In the bowels of that mystic behemoth, the people.
“And when it comes again,” say watchers, “we are ready.”
How many times
in the folded and quiet yesterdays
has it happened?
“You may burn my flesh and bones
and throw the ashes to the four winds.”
smiled one of them,
“Yet my voice shall linger on
The People, Yes Page 4