Classic Poem

I will sing a song of noisy tumultuous Cities,
Who sit upon the rocks and lure the adventurous youths
With their singing.
The Imperious Ones who bathe their feet in the blood
Of men and women and little children.
They flaunt smoky banners against the morning,
Chanting songs of combat.
For the night-watches, they put on burnished armor
Thick with jewels, marshaling
Their golden phalanxes to the water's edge.
They set watchmen on the hills
With sparkling torches.
And slumber as a queen surrounded by glittering hosts.
They are the Irresistible Ones,
With stony smile and marble breasts,
Smiling, beckoning as the Desert smiles and beckons.
Beautiful, Debauched Ones, deceiving, betraying
As the Desert deceives and betrays.
Barren deserts where the multitude
Wander in pursuit of enticing mirages;
Deserts filled with flowers among the stones.
Voluptuous, magnificent mistresses;
Secretly by night changing to vampires;
Ogresses devouring their lovers;
A mad woman crooning over the corpse of her child;
Mills which grind the bones of men;
Stony hives whose honey is bitter, and drones eat the sweet;
A courtesan tossing her handkerchief
Insolently to the pitying moon.
How often under the moon I have heard
Sobbing in the grief-carved channels,
Where the red stream chafes against the walls,
Each drop isolate, desolate,
None knowing another;
The over-full channels, flowing, ebbing,
Forever flowing. Roses on the current
And broken boughs and withered leaves.
How often have I heard the scream of Poverty
As Winter chased her, naked, over the stones.

Cities, tall Titans, overpowering, majestic;
Challenging with a beautiful defiance.
Domes, spires, minarets, towers, cloud-touching roofs,
Earth's crown in mighty fretwork, set with brilliants
And wrought by miracle-working jinns.
Streaming plumes of steam, and scarfs of smoke restlessly coiling
In soft convulations.
Streets, turbulent and murmurous channels
Which the cleansing rain turns to blazing, bewildering
Rivers of light, scintillant, reflecting as mirrors.
Beside these sits a sensuous barbarian,
Crude, childish, inviting, toying with her jewels,
Proud, self-confident, wondering, staring, ominously snarling.

As a tiger languidly licks the hand of her tamer,
The waters lick the dock, and play lazily
Where lie the great steamers musing on conquered tempests.
Their hollow entrails are gorged with the spoil of many ports.
They wait for the plunder of the globe.
Ingots of silver, the gold of wheat and corn;
Orange, lemons, hides and glass and cotton;
Coal and salt, wine and figs and iron;
Machinery and silk, tea and bags and crockery;
Cases, bales, carboys, crates and casks and barrels,
All the gleanings, delvings, hammerings of the world.
Here slim-sparred vessels cease from waving their masts
To and fro against the sky, and rest awhile.
Little dirty tugs, puff fussily about, as those in authority.
Donkey-engines cough intermittently;
Swinging the intelligent derricks, lading and unlading.
Longshoremen, in faded flannel shirts,
Open at the throat, showing brawny breasts,
Load and unload drowsy steamers, pregnant;
Swinging great sling-loads skilfully through the hatches.
They run back and forth with trucks, breathless, sweating.
How encouraging is their strength,
And the silken play of their muscles, exquisite;
Powerful to accomplish when Justice
Is foreman of society.
They are skilled athletes
But they earn not the applause of athletes.
Theirs is the sweaty arena, without leisure.
They are soldiers in a great battle without glory.
If one stumbles, others pass over him.
If one be wounded, he is lost,
Ruthlessly thrown on the scrapheap.
Endlessly the trucks roll on.
Long freight-trains rumble through the night
And in the early morning, with a sudden crash,
Stop beside the warehouse.
The huge engines, their husbands, go away panting.
Trembling with power,
They have done their service.
How beneficent the service
When Justice shall hold the lever.
The trains are snatched empty
And amid shouting at horses and men,
Crack of whips and honk of horns,
The trucks and auto-trucks are loaded,
Hurrying into the canyons of the city.
When Justice walks shoulder to shoulder with the workers
This turmoil shall be the hum of gladness
As hives in June when the cherry trees blossom.
The stones of the City are eloquent.
Their laughter is cold; but their tears are hot.
They weep for the little mothers who smile a forced smile,
Selling themselves for bread.
Cripples with leering hypocrisy prey on a greater hypocrisy.
Luxury tramples Misery, and Misery exults secretly
At the day when it shall trample Luxury.
The churches of the city are open and empty;
The jails are barred but full:
Jails, sores of the social scurvy.
I have smelt the salt of the sea
In the streets, and the river-wind has crept
Up the alleys to kiss my cheek,
But not to kiss my brothers whose souls rot in the jail.
Even in the streets I have tasted
The spice of the mountains,
And kissed the lips of a lost dryad
Strayed to a fountain; but my jail-brothers
Never loaf on the breast of their great mother.
Nor can their souls expand as trees expand toward the sun.
How crowded with the Masters were the jails
If jails were truly a place for robbers.
And how overcrowded with the Rich were the jails
If jails were a place for loafers.

Into the jails trickle the muddy streams
From the lean, pitiful, squalid slums,
Lees of an accursed vintage, squeezed by the Masters:
Misery drained to the bottom of the vats.
I have seen the naked poor enjoying the city-gutters,
In August, and puny children making a brook
Of the filthy waters; refusing to forget Childhood;
Grasping at Childhood, a grey moth
Which flutters by; escaping their thin little fingers.
I thought of all free things: the large sky,
And the rivers which carry the sky
Under the whispering willows;
Rivulets fretting their way
Through the twisted roots of silver-stemmed alders;
Winds dancing with tall grasses;
Striped chipmunks, dragon-flies and wrens;
All quick and shining things, and bees.
But I saw only gaunt ghosts
In the slums of the cities.
I smelled only the stench of Poverty.
Poverty which is made by Man — unnatural, needless.

My heart is heavy when I think of those who hunger
For the brown, wet lap of April,
The streaming breasts of the Mother.
Her coquetry with the jewelry of buds
Is more beautiful than any city.
The sensuous hands of the west-wind stroke
Green, silver-tasseled oats into billows,
Seductive as the bosom of a girl.
O that the little ones of the gutter might rest awhile
In the abundant arms of October who, as a young warrior,
Laden with the loot of cities, marshals the fruit trees
Heavy for plundering.
As a mother at evening calls to her children,
So Earth calls to every one of her offspring,
" Come unto me. I will feed you all.
" Not one of you shall lie down hungry. "
But the cruel hand of the Masters is over her mouth.

What to me is the tinkling wheel in the blackbird's throat,
Or all the benediction of mountains and valleys
While thousands lay themselves wearily
On the sacrificial altar of the city?

Cities, Omnipotent, Songful, Luxurious;
Queens loaded with jewels, seated on thrones,
Receiving much tribute.
Monsters, powerful, restless, sinuous;
Terrifying, vague, vast, mysterious;
Mystic, relentless, beautiful; not yet beautiful;
Lying on carrion, as a sleek and glossy lion,
Roaring, muttering, sullenly growling,
Devours his prey under the stars.