The People, Yes Page 21

  “NO HANDS WANTED

  next month maybe

  next year maybe

  the works start.”

  96

  Big oil tanks squat next the railroad.

  The shanties of the poor wear cinder coats.

  The red and blue lights signal.

  The control board tells the story.

  Lights go on and off on a map.

  Each light is a train gone by

  Or a train soon heaving in.

  The big chutes grow cold.

  They stack up shadows.

  Their humps hold iron ore.

  This gang works hard.

  Some faces light up to hear:

  “We work today—

  what do you know about that?”

  97

  Somebody has to make the tubs and pails.

  Not yet do the tubs and pails grow on trees

  and all you do is pick ’em.

  For tubs and pails we go first to the timber cruisers, to the loggers, hewers, sawyers, choppers, peelers, pilers, saw filers, skid greasers, slip tenders, teamsters, lumber shovers, tallymen, planers, bandsawmen, circular-saw-men, hoopers, matchers, nailers, painters, truckmen, packers, haulers,

  For the sake of a tub or a pail to you.

  And for the sake of a jack-knife in your pocket,

  or a scissors on your table,

  The dynamite works get into production and deliver to the miners who blast, the mule drivers, engineers and firemen on the dinkies, the pumpmen, the rope riders, the sinkers and sorters, the carpenters, electricians and repairmen, the foremen and straw-bosses,

  They get out the ore and send it to the smelters, the converters where by the hands and craft of furnace crushers and hot blast handlers, ladlers, puddlers, the drag-out man, the hookup man, the chipper, the spannerman, the shearsman, the squeezer,

  There is steel for the molders, the cuders, buffers, finishers, forgers, grinders, polishers, temperers—

  This for the sake of a jack-knife to your pocket or a shears on your table.

  These are the people, with flaws and failings, with patience, sacrifice, devotion, the people.

  The people is a farmer, a tenant and a share-cropper, a plowman, a plow-grinder and a choreman, a chumer, a chicken-picker and a combine driver, a threshing crew and an old settlers’ picnic, a creamery co-operative, or a line of men on wagons selling tomatoes or sugar-beets on contract to a cannery, a refinery,

  The people is a tall freight-handier and a tough longshoreman, a greasy fireman and a gambling oil-well shooter with a driller and tooler ready, a groping miner going underground with a headlamp, an engineer and a fireman with an eye for semaphores, a seaman, deckhand, pilot at the wheel in fog and stars.

  The people? A weaver of steel-and-concrete floors and walls fifty floors up, a blue-print designer, an expert calculator and accountant, a carpenter with an eye for joists and elbows, a bricklayer with an ear for the pling of a trowel, a pile-driver crew pounding down the pier-posts.

  The people? Harness bulls and narcotic dicks, multigraph girls and soda-jerkers, hat girls, bat boys, sports writers, ghost writers, popcorn and peanut squads, flatfeet, scavengers, mugs saying “Aw go button your nose,” squirts hollering “Aw go kiss yourself outa dis game intuh anuddah,” deadheads, hops, cappers, come-ons, tin horns, small timers, the night club outfits helping the soup-and-fish who have to do something between midnight and bedtime.

  The people? A puddler in the flaring splinters of newmade steel, a milk-wagon-driver getting the once-over from a milk inspector, a sand-hog with “the bends,” a pack-rat, a snow-queen, janitors, jockeys, white collar lads, pearl divers, ped dlers, bundlestiffs, pants pressers, cleaners and dyers, lice and rat exterminators.

  So many forgotten, so many never remembered at all, yet there are well-diggers, school-teachers, window washers who unless buckled proper dance on air and go down down, coal heavers, roundhouse wipers, hostlers, sweepers, samplers, weighers, sackers, carvers, bloom chippers, kiln burners, cooks, bakers, beekeepers, goat raiser, goat hay growers, slag-rollers, melters, solderers, track greasers, jiggermen, snowplow drivers, clamdiggers, stoolpigeons, the buck private, the gob, the leatherneck, the cop—

  In uniform, in white collars, in overalls, in denim and gingham, a number on an assembly line, a name on a polling list, a postoffice address, a crime and sports page reader, a movie goer and radio listener, a stock-market sucker, a sure thing for slick gamblers, a union man or non-union, a job holder or a job hunter,

  Always either employed, disemployed, unemployed and employable or unemployable, a world series fan, a home buyer on a shoestring, a down-and-out or a game fighter who will die fighting.

  The people is the grand canyon of humanity

  and many many miles across.

  The people is pandora’s box, humpty dumpty,

  a clock of doom and an avalanche when it

  turns loose.

  The people rest on land and weather, on time

  and the changing winds.

  The people have come far and can look back

  and say, “We will go farther yet.”

  The people is a plucked goose and a shorn

  sheep of legalized fraud

  And the people is one of those mountain slopes

  holding a volcano of retribution,

  Slow in all things, slow in its gathered wrath,

  slow in its onward heave,

  Slow in its asking: “Where are we now? what time

  is it?”

  98

  Hold down the skylines now with your themes,

  Proud marching oblongs of floodlighted walls.

  Your bottom rocks and caissons rest

  In money and dreams, in blood and wishes.

  Stand on your tall haunches of checkered windows with your spikes of white light

  Speaking across the cool blue of the night mist:

  Can we read our writing?

  What are we saving on the skyline?

  Tell it to us, skyscrapers around Wacker Drive in Chicago,

  Tall oblongs in orchestral confusion from Battery to Bronx,

  Along Market Street to the Ferry flashing the Golden Gate sunset,

  Steel-and-concrete witnesses gazing down in San Antonio on the little old Alamo,

  Gazing down in Washington on the antiques of Pennsylvania Avenue: what are these so near my feet far down?

  Blinking across old Quaker footpaths of the City of Brotherly Love: what have we here? shooting crossed lights on the old Boston Common: who goes there?

  Rising in Duluth to flicker with windows over Lake Superior, standing up in Atlanta to face toward Kenesaw Mountain,

  Tall with steel automotive roots in Detroit, with transport, coal and oil roots in Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, flickering afar to the ore barges on Lake Erie, to the looming chainstore trucks on the hard roads.

  Wigwagging with air beacons on Los Angeles City hall, telling the Mississippi traffic it’s nighttime in St. Louis, New Orleans, Minneapolis and St. Paul—

  Can we read our writing? what are we saying on the skyline?

  Hold down your horizon spikes of light, proud marching oblongs.

  Your bottom rocks and pilings rest in money and dreams, in blood and wishes.

  The structural iron workers, the riveters and bolt catchers, know what you cost.

  Yes, who are these on the harbor skyline,

  With the sun gone down and the funnels and checkers of light talking?

  Who are these tall witnesses? who these high phantoms?

  What can they tell of a thousand years to come,

  People and people rising and fading with the springs and autumns, people like leaves out of the earth in spring, like leaves down the autumn wind—

  What shall a thousand years tell a young tumultuous restless people?

  They have made these steel skeletons like themselves—

  Lean, tumultuous, restless:

  They have put up tal
l witnesses,

  to fade in a cool midnight blue,

  to rise in evening rainbow prints.

  99

  The man in the street is fed

  with lies in peace, gas in war,

  and he may live now

  just around the corner from you

  trying to sell

  the only thing he has to sell,

  the power of his hand and brain

  to labor for wages, for pay,

  for cash of the realm.

  And there are no takers, he can’t connect

  Maybe he says, “Some pretty good men are on the street.”

  Maybe he says, “I’m just a palooka . . . all washed up.”

  Maybe he’s a wild kid ready for his first stickup.

  Maybe he’s bummed a thousand miles and has a diploma.

  Maybe he can take whatever the police can hand him,

  Too many of him saying in their own wild way,

  “The worst they can give you is lead in the guts.”

  Whatever the wild kids want to do they’ll do

  And whoever gives them ideas, faiths, slogans,

  Whoever touches the bottom flares of them,

  Connects with something prouder than all deaths

  For they can live on hard corn and like it.

  They are the original sons of the wild jackass

  Crowned and clothed with what the Unknown Soldier had

  If he went to his fate in a pride over all deaths.

  Give them a cause and they are a living dynamite.

  They are the game fighters who will die fighting.

  Here and there a man in the street

  is young, hard as nails,

  cold with questions he asks

  from his burning insides.

  Bred in a motorized world of trial and error

  He measures by millionths of an inch,

  Knows ball bearings from spiral gearings,

  Chain transmission, heat treatment of steel,

  Speeds and feeds of automatic screw machines,

  Having handled electric tools

  With pistol grip and trigger switch.

  Yet he can’t connect and he can name thousands

  Like himself idle amid plants also idle.

  He studies the matter of what is justice

  And revises himself on money, comfort, good name.

  He doesn’t know what he wants

  And says when he gets it he’ll know it.

  He asks, “Why is this what it is?”

  He asks, “Who is paying for this propaganda?”

  He asks, “Who owns the earth and why?”

  Here and there a wife or sweetheart sees with him

  The pity of being sold down the river in a smoke

  Of confusions taken from the mouths of the dead

  And spoken as though those dead are alive now

  And would say now what they said then.

  “Let him go as far as he likes,” says one lawyer who sits on

  several heavy directorates.

  “What do we care? Is he any of our business? If he knew how he could manage.

  “There are exceptional cases but where there is poverty you will generally find they were improvident and lacking in thrift and industry.

  “The system of free competition we now have has made America the greatest and richest country on the face of the globe.

  “You will seek in vain for any land where so large a number of people have had so many of the good things of life.

  “The malcontents who stir up class feeling and engender class hatred are the foremost enemies of our republic and its constitutional government.”

  And so on and so on in further confusions taken from the mouths of the dead and spoken as though those dead are alive now and would say now what they said then.

  Like the form of a seen and unheard prowler,

  Like a slow and cruel violence,

  is the known unspoken menace:

  Do what we tell you or go hungry;

  listen to us or you don’t eat.

  He walks and walks and walks

  and wonders why the hell he built the road.

  Once I built a railroad

  . . . now . . .

  brother, can you spare a dime?

  To his dry well a man carried

  all the water he could carry,

  primed the pump, drew out the water.

  and now

  he has all the water he can carry.

  We asked the cyclone

  to go around our barn

  but it didn’t hear us.

  100

  The Great Sphinx and the Pyramids say:

  “Man passed this way and saw

  a lot of ignorant besotted pharaohs.”

  The pink pagodas, jade rams and marble elephants of China say:

  “Man came along here too

  and met suave and cruel mandarins.”

  The temples and forums of Greece and Rome say:

  “Man owned man here where man bought and sold man in the open slave auctions; by these chattels stone was piled on stone to make these now crumbled pavilions.”

  The medieval Gothic cathedrals allege:

  “Mankind said prayers here for itself and for stiff

  necked drunken robber barons.”

  And the skyscrapers of Manhattan, Detroit, Chicago, London, Paris, Berlin—what will they say when the hoarse and roaring years of their origin have sunk to a soft whispering?

  Will the same fathoms come for the skyscrapers?

  Will the years heave and the wind and rain haul and hover

  Till sand and dust have picked the locks and blown the safes and smashed the windows and filled the elevator-shafts and packed the rooms and made ashes of the papers, the stocks and bonds, the embossed and attested securities?

  Will it be colder and colder yet with ice on the ashes?

  Even though the tide-deeds read “forever and in perpetuity unto heirs and assigns for all time this deed is executed”?

  Will it be all smoothed over into a hush where no one pleads

  “Who were they? where did they come from? and why were they in such a hurry when they knew so little where they were going?”

  As between the rulers and the ruled-over what does the record say?

  Name the empires and republics with rulers wise beyond their people.

  When have they read the signs and recognized a bridge generation?

  When have the overlords and their paid liars and strumpets

  Held as a first question, “What do the people want besides what we tell them they ought for their own good to want?”?

  And second, “How much of living fact is under these cries and revolts, these claims that exploiters ride the people?”?

  And third, “What do they do to themselves who sell out the people?”?

  When hush money is paid

  to whom does it go

  and by whom is it paid

  and why should there be a hush?

  When aldermen and legislative members say,

  “We can put this through for you but it will take a little grease,”

  What is the grease they mean and from whom comes this grease?

  Let this be spoken of softly. Let sleeping dogs lie.

  What you don’t know won’t hurt you.