Classic Poem

Over the summer, my wife and I have my mother's apartment …
It is at least high and quiet in the sultry weather …
But we feel guilty … I am a member of the Socialist Party:
I attend meetings in back of a saloon in a density of tobacco-smoke,
I smell the smells of the workers in breweries,
And of girls who work in cigar factories …
I listen to interminable wranglings …
Is it a little like eavesdropping?

They know it … they begin a movement against the intellectuals …
I am surprised and pained …

And yet I belong there … if they need art and knowledge,
It is I need something of earth, something primitive and crude …

They would repress what they lack through repressing me,
I would gain what I lack through joining them …

So I feel guilty about a large apartment for only three people,
And my guilt and shame are deep …

But deeper than guilt and shame is the trouble of life …
What are my wife and I but ignorant helpless children at the mercy of blundering doctors?

Our child has been sick since birth, and there has been not a night of rest,
We are thin, pale, and exhausted: we wonder how children are ever brought up …

And our love for that child is something really to fear,
It is so poignant, so sharp …
If anything should happen to him, what will happen to us?

I am so tired I cannot work: and I must work:
We are out of money, we are faced with dribbling loans and horror of dependence …
I write poor stuff: it does not sell: we grow despairing …
Then one day a Catholic paper takes a story
And saves us with seventy-five dollars …

But our boy? As I wheel him in his carriage along the Park
People stop out of pity … a blue baby … a baby that cannot live …
But he must live … a terrible night comes when the doctor tells us he will have pneumonia,
And of course we know what that means …

We are left alone: we confront each other:
We read death in each other's faces …
And then from despair comes desperate strength … we rise, and we swear we shall save him …

How? We do not know … it is mystical …
But we shall snatch that child from death …

We stay up in shifts all night, one sleeps while the other watches …
Slowly the summer dawn breaks, and I lean and look at the gasping child …
And suddenly his breathing is natural, he is sound asleep …

I wake my wife: we weep in each other's arms …
The crisis is past … the boy will live …

Thus are children called upon to be mother and father …