The People, Yes Read online

  In the speech and look of the main star

  and the lesser stars hovering in a

  cluster and an orbit,

  They know in the pressure of their personal

  ego that this too shall pass away and be

  lost in the long mass shadow of the everliving

  people

  And down under the taboos and emblems, behind pomp and ritual, posture and strut, if the word justice is only one more word, if the talk about justice is merely windowdressing, if liberty is pushed too far in the name of discipline, if the delicate lines between personal freedom and requisite social performance are not every moment a terrible load of care

  There will be a payday and little bells lost in

  the clang and boom of big bells.

  People are what they are

  because they have come out of what was.

  Therefore they should bow down before what was

  and take it and say it’s good—or should they?

  The advocates and exemplars of pride and gluttony

  are forgotten or recalled with loathing.

  The mouthpieces of dumb misery are remembered

  for the bitter silences they broke with crying:

  “Look, see this!

  if it is alive or only half-alive

  what name does it go by,

  why is it what it is

  and how long shall it be?”

  Who can fight against the future?

  What is the decree of tomorrow?

  Haven’t the people gone on and on

  always taking more of their own?

  How can the orders of the day

  be against the people in this time?

  What can stop them from taking

  more and more of their own?

  72

  What is a judge? A judge is a seated torso and head swom before God never to sell justice nor play favorites while he umpires the disputes brought before him.

  When you take the cigar out of your face and the fedora off your head in the presence of the court, you do it because it is required from those who are supposed to know they have come into a room where burns the white light of that priceless abstraction named justice.

  What is a judge? The perfect judge is austere, impersonal, impartial, marking the line of right or wrong by a hairsbreadth.

  Before him, bow humbly, bow low, be a pilgrim, light a candle

  For he is a rara avis, a rare bird, a white blackbird, a snowwhite crow.

  What is a judge? A featherless human biped having bowels, glands, bladders, and intricate blood vessels of the brain,

  One more frail mortal, one more candle a sudden change of wind might blow out as any common candle blows out in a wind change

  So that never again does he sit in his black robes of solemn import before a crowded courtroom saying two-years ten-years twenty-years life for you or “hanged by the neck till you are dead dead dead.”

  What is a judge? One may be the owner of himself coming to his decisions often in a blur of hesitations knowing by what snarled courses and ropes of reason justice operates, with reservations, in twilight zones.

  What is a judge? Another owns no more than the little finger of himself, others owning him, others having placed him where he is, others telling him what they want and getting it, others referring to him as “our judge” as though he is measured and weighed beforehand the same as a stockyards hog, others holding him to decisions evasive of right or wrong, others writing his decisions for him, the atmosphere hushed and guarded, the atmosphere having a faint stockyards perfume.

  What is a judge? Sometimes a mind giving one side the decision and the other side a lot of language and sympathy, sometimes washing his hands and rolling a pair of bones and leaving equity to a pair of galloping ivories.

  What is a judge? A man picked for a job by politicians with an eye sometimes on justice for the public, equal rights to all persons entering—or again with an eye on lucrative favors and special accommodations—a man having bowels, glands, bladder, and intricate blood vessels of the brain.

  Take that cigar out of your face. Take that hat off your head.

  And why? why? Because here we are sworn never to sell justice and here burns the white light of that priceless abstraction named justice.

  What is a judge?

  He is a man.

  Yes, after all, and no matter what,

  and beyond all procedures and investitures,

  a judge is nothing more nor less than a man—

  one man having his one-

  man path, his one-man circle and orbit among other men

  each of whom is one man.

  Therefore should any judge open his mouth

  and speak as though his words have an

  added light and weight beyond the speech

  of one man?

  Of what is he the mouthpiece when he speaks?

  Of any ideas or passions other than those gathered and met in the mesh of his own personality? Can his words be measured forth in so special a realm of exact justice instructed by tradition, that they do not relate to the living transitory blood of his vitals and brain, the blood so soon to cool in evidence of his mortal kinship with all other men?

  73

  In the light of the cold glimmer of what everybody knows, why should the owners of the judges speak of respect for the law and the sanctity of the Constitution when they know so well how justice has been taken for a ride and thrown gagged and beaten into a ditch?

  Why is it now a saying of the people, “You can’t convict a million dollars”?

  Why is the bribe-taker convicted so often and the bribe-giver so seldom?

  Why does a hoary proverb live on its allegation that the nets of the law gather the petty thieves and let the big ones get away? what does this mean in the homes of the poor? how does it connect with crime and the poor?

  Why should the propertyless depositors of wrecked banks be saying, “Wreck a bank from the outside and you get twenty years, wreck it from the inside and all you have to do is start another bank”?

  What do the people say in their homes, in their churches, in their gathering places over coffee-and-doughnuts beer-and-pretzels? and how does the talk run about millionaire robbers, malefactors of great wealth, sitting easy with their loot while

  One-two-three, five-six-seven every day the police seize and the courts order to jail

  this skulker who stole a bottle of milk,

  this shadow who ran off with a loaf of bread,

  this wanderer who purloined a baby sweater

  in a basement salesroom—

  And the case is dismissed of the railroad yard plain-clothes detective who repeatedly called “Stop!” to a boy running with a sack of coal and the boy not stopping the dick let him have it. “It was dark and I couldn’t see him clear and I aimed at his legs. My intention was to stop him running. I didn’t mean for the bullet to go as high on him as it did.”

  Thieves? Yes. Little thieves? Yes. And they get it where the chicken gets the ax? Yes. And the big shots are something else? Yes. And you can’t convict a million dollars? Not unless Tuesday is Saturday, neighbor.

  What is a jury? Twelve men picked by chance and a couple of lawyers, twelve men good and true or not-so-good, six of one and a half dozen of the other.

  A jury? A bundle of twelve fagots, a dozen human sticks light and dark with loves and hates, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, freethinker, merchant, farmer, workingman, thief, wets and drys, union and scab, savers and spenders, tightwads and crapshooters, locked in a room to come out saying Yes in one voice, No in one voice, or else, “Don’t ask us what is justice, we agree to disagree,” all in one voice.

  A jury? Twelve names out of a hat. Twelve picked blindfolded from a city directory or a polling list. The next twelve crossing Main Street, two blocks from the post-office: Odd Fellows, Masons, Knights of Columbus, deacons, poker-players, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Ku Klux and Anti-Ku Klux, ball fans
, chippie chasers, teetotalers, converts and backsliders.

  Now you got a jury. Add one judge. Add a few lawyers. Add newspapers, town gossip, “what everybody says.” Add witnesses and evidence. Add it all. The jury verdict is guilty not-guilty or agree-to-disagree.

  “Do you solemnly swear before the ever-

  living God that the testimony you

  are about to give in this cause shall

  be the truth, the whole truth, and

  nothing but the truth?”

  “No, I don’t. I can tell you what I saw

  and what I heard and I’ll swear to

  that by the everliving God but the

  more I study about it the more sure

  I am that nobody but the everliving

  God knows the whole truth and if

  you summoned Christ as a witness in

  this case what He would tell you

  would burn your insides with the

  pity and the mystery of it.”

  74

  What other oaths are wanted now?

  You can never make moon poems

  for people who never see the moon.

  Your moon poems are aimed

  at people who look at the moon

  and say, “Hello moon, good old moon,

  “I knew you wouldn’t forget me,

  “Throw me a kiss, moon,

  “I’ll be seeing you, moon.”

  And the sun? what of the sun?

  Can you make a sun poem

  For those having soot on the window-sill?

  When smoke and smudge and building walls

  Stand between them and the sun

  How can they get to know the sun

  And how would they know a sun poem if they

  Met one coming straight at them?

  What use for them to hold a hand up against

  the sun for the sake of seeing a silhouette

  of the blue frame of the handbones?

  In the slums overshadowed by smokestacks,

  In the tomato cans in the window-sills

  The geraniums have a low weeping song,

  “Not yet have we known the sun,

  not yet have we known the sun,”

  Modulated with a hoping song,

  “Some day we shall meet the sun

  “And gather pieces of the sun into ourselves

  “And be no longer stunted,

  no longer runts of the slums.”

  And babies? what of the babies?

  Can you make baby poems

  For those who love special babies

  clean antiseptic babies?

  what of those Red Indian babies

  fresh from the birthing-crotch?

  For each of them the mystery-man raised

  his right hand toward the sky and called:

  “Hey you sun moon stars

  and you winds clouds rain mist,

  “Listen to me! listen!

  “The news is another baby belonging

  has come to this earth of ours.

  “Make its path smooth so it can reach

  the top of the first hill

  and the second hill.

  “And hey you valleys rivers lakes trees grasses

  you make its path smooth so it can reach

  the top of the third hill.

  “And listen you birds of the air,

  you animals of the tall timbers,

  you bugs and creepers,

  you too listen!

  “All you of sky earth and air, I ask you, beg you

  “Pass this baby on till it climbs up over

  and beyond the fourth hill.

  “From then on this child will be strong enough

  “To travel on its own and see what is beyond

  those four hills!”

  75

  Hunger and only hunger changes worlds?

  The dictate of the belly

  that gnawing under the navel,

  this alone is the builder and the pathfinder

  sending man into danger and fire

  and death by struggle?

  Yes and no, no and yes.

  The strong win against the weak.

  The strong lose against the stronger.

  And across the bitter years and the howling winters

  the deathless dream will be the stronger,

  the dream of equity will win.

  There are shadows and bones shot with lights

  too strong to be lost.

  Can the wilderness be put behind?

  Shall man always go on dog-eat-dog?

  Who says so?

  The stronger?

  And who is the stronger?

  And how long shall the stronger hold on

  as the stronger?

  What will tomorrow write?

  “Of the people by the people for the people?”

  What mockers ever wrung a crop from a waiting soil

  Or when did cold logic bring forth a child?

  “What use is it?” they asked a kite-flying sky gazer

  And he wished in return to know, “What use is a baby?”

  The dreaming scholars who quested the useless,

  who wanted to know merely for the sake of knowing,

  they sought and harnessed electrodynamic volts

  becoming in time thirty billion horses in one country

  hauling with thirty-billion-horse-power

  and this is an early glimpse, a dim beginning,

  the first hill of a series of hills.

  What comes after the spectrum?

  With what will the test-tubes be shaken tomorrow?

  For what will the acetylene torch and pneumatic chisel be scrapped?

  What will the international partnerships of the world laboratories track down next, what new fuels, amalgams, alloys, seeds, cross-breeds, unforeseen short cuts to power?

  Whose guess is better than anybody else’s on whether the breed of fire-bringers is run out, whether light rays, death rays, laugh rays, are now for us only in a dim beginning?

  Across the bitter years and the howling winters

  the deathless dream will be the stronger

  the dream of equity will win.

  76

  The record is a scroll of many indecipherable scrawls,

  telling the pay of the people for commencing action

  toward redress of wrongs too heavy

  to be longer borne.

  “No strike is ever lost”: an old cry

  heard before the strike begins and heard long after, and

  “No strike is ever lost”: either a thought or an instinct

  equivalent to “Give me liberty or give me death.”

  On the horizon a cloud no larger than

  a man’s hand rolls larger and darker when masses of people

  begin saying, “Any kind of death is better than this kind

  of life.”

  The machine world of the insects

  individual spiders engineering exploits

  interwoven colonies of bees and ants

  clouds of grasshopper destroyers

  —they carry lessons and warnings

  they do what they must

  they are beyond argument.

  The flowing of the stream clears it of pollution.