Slums
In the dusty glare of a humid morning,
The slow horse-trucks get in each other's way,
The drivers lash and curse,
The rough-paved streets are sticky with flies,
The hucksters shout, the fat dirty women scream in their crabbed bargainings:
Filth shoves against filth, and crying children are yanked by the arm and told to “Shut up!”
One sees too the swindle of housing:
Vast populations are broom-swept into this industrial devastation:
Lying tissues of plaster, brick and wood …
And this acreage swarms with neglect …
The factories vomit their poisonous smokes in the very faces of the people:
Dirt lies where it fell: the forlorn smoke-blackened trees shrivel and wither:
And at dawn, in the refuse heaps, one sees mangy dogs like jackals nosing for morsels …
Yes, humanity in the gross is ugly, dirty and abhorrent:
War almost seems as a necessary cleansing of this abscess:
As if Earth had a carbuncle on her smooth and beautiful flesh.
Among all the animals, man is the dirtiest and cheapest and ugliest:
Even a coyote has bright burning eyes, lithe health and a clean fur:
Even a hog is enamoured of sunshine and has a rock-strong natural huskiness:
What have we done with ourselves, we of the race of Ulysses, David and Roland,
That thus in the mass, we appear such rubbish and refuse?
The slow horse-trucks get in each other's way,
The drivers lash and curse,
The rough-paved streets are sticky with flies,
The hucksters shout, the fat dirty women scream in their crabbed bargainings:
Filth shoves against filth, and crying children are yanked by the arm and told to “Shut up!”
One sees too the swindle of housing:
Vast populations are broom-swept into this industrial devastation:
Lying tissues of plaster, brick and wood …
And this acreage swarms with neglect …
The factories vomit their poisonous smokes in the very faces of the people:
Dirt lies where it fell: the forlorn smoke-blackened trees shrivel and wither:
And at dawn, in the refuse heaps, one sees mangy dogs like jackals nosing for morsels …
Yes, humanity in the gross is ugly, dirty and abhorrent:
War almost seems as a necessary cleansing of this abscess:
As if Earth had a carbuncle on her smooth and beautiful flesh.
Among all the animals, man is the dirtiest and cheapest and ugliest:
Even a coyote has bright burning eyes, lithe health and a clean fur:
Even a hog is enamoured of sunshine and has a rock-strong natural huskiness:
What have we done with ourselves, we of the race of Ulysses, David and Roland,
That thus in the mass, we appear such rubbish and refuse?
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