The People, Yes Read online

  and-out, there a game fighter who will die

  fighting.

  20

  Who shall speak for the people?

  Who knows the works from A to Z

  so he can say, “I know what the

  people want”? Who is this phenom?

  where did he come from?

  When have the people been half as rotten

  as what the panderers to the people

  dangle before crowds?

  When has the fiber of the people been as

  shoddy as what is sold to the people

  by cheaters?

  What is it the panderers and cheaters of

  the people play with and trade on?

  The credulity of believers and hopers—and

  when is a heart less of a heart because

  of belief and hope?

  What is the tremulous line between credulity

  on the one side and on the other

  the hypotheses and illusions of inventors,

  discoverers, navigators who chart

  their course by what they hope and

  believe is beyond the horizon?

  What is a stratosphere fourteen miles from

  the earth or a sunken glass house on

  the sea-bottom amid fish and featherstars

  unless a bet that man can shove

  on beyond yesterday’s record of man

  the hoper, the believer?

  How like a sublime sanctuary of human

  credulity is that room where amid

  tubes, globes and retorts they shoot

  with heavy hearts of hydrogen and

  batter with fire-strearns of power hoping

  to smash the atom:

  Who are these bipeds trying to take apart

  the atom and isolate its electrons and

  make it tell why it is what it is? Believers

  and hopers.

  Let the work of their fathers and elderbrothers

  be cancelled this instant and

  what would happen?

  Nothing—only every tool, bus, car, light,

  torch, bulb, print, film, instrument or

  communication depending for its life

  on electrodynamic power would stop

  and stand dumb and silent.

  21

  Who knows the people, the migratory harvest hands and berry pickers, the loan shark victims, the installment house wolves,

  The jugglers in sand and wood who smooth their hands along the mold that casts the frame of your motor-car engine,

  The metal polishers, solderers, and paint spray hands who put the final finish on the car,

  The riveters and bolt-catchers, the cowboys of the air in the big city, the cowhands of the Great Plains, the ex-convicts, the bellhops, redcaps, lavatory men—

  The union organizer with his list of those ready to join and those hesitating, the secret paid informers who report every move toward organizing,

  The house-to-house canvassers, the doorbell ringers, the good-moming-have-you-heard boys, the strike pickets, the strikebreakers, the hired sluggers, the ambulance crew, the ambulance chasers, the picture chasers, the meter readers, the oysterboat crews, the harborlight tenders—

  who knows the people?

  Who knows this from pit to peak? The people, yes.

  22

  The people is a lighted believer and

  hoper—and this is to be held against

  them?

  The panderers and cheaters are to have

  their way in trading on these lights

  of the people?

  Not always, no, not always, for the people

  is a knower too.

  With Johannson steel blocks the people

  can measure itself as a knower

  Knowing what it knows today with a deeper

  knowing than ever

  Knowing in millionths and billionths of

  an inch

  Knowing in the mystery of one automatic

  machine expertly shaping for your eyes

  another automatic machine

  Knowing in traction, power-shafts, transmission,

  twist drills, grinding, gears—

  Knowing in the night air mail, the newsreel

  flicker, the broadcasts from Tokio,

  Shanghai, Bombay and Somaliland—

  The people a knower whose knowing

  grows by what it feeds on

  The people wanting to know more, wanting.

  The birds of the air and the fish of the sea

  leave off where man begins.

  23

  “The kindest and gentlest here are the

  murderers,” said the penitentiary warden.

  “I killed the man because I loved him,”

  said the woman the police took yesterday.

  “I had such a good time,” said the woman leaving a movie theater

  with tears in her eyes. “It was a swell picture.”

  “A divorced man goes and marries the same kind of a woman he

  is just rid of,” said the lawyer.

  “Life is a gigantic fake,” read the farewell note of the highschool

  boy who killed himself.

  “I pick jurors with nonconvicting faces,”

  said the lawyer who usually cleared his man.

  “We earn and we earn and all that we earn goes into the grave,”

  said the basement-dwelling mother who had lost six of her

  eight children from the white plague.

  “Don’t mourn for me but organize,” said the Utah I.W.W. before

  a firing squad executed sentence of death on him, his last

  words running: “Let her go!”

  “Look out or you’ll be ready for one of these one-man bungalows

  with silver handles,” laughed the traffic cop.

  “Tie your hat to the saddle and let’s ride,”

  yelled one in a five-gallon hat in Albuquerque.

  “If I never see you again don’t think the tune long,” smiled an

  old-timer in Wyoming moonlight.

  On tiptoe and whispering so no one else could hear, a little girl at

  Brownsville spoke into the ear of the chief executive of the

  great State of Texas: “How does it feel to be Governor?”

  Why when the stock crash came did the man in black silk pajamas

  let himself headfirst off a fire escape down ten floors to

  a stone sidewalk? His sixty million dollars had shrunk to ten

  million and he didn’t see how he could get along.

  “If she was a wicked witch she wouldn’t say so, she would be so

  wicked she wouldn’t know it,” said little Anne.

  “God will forgive me, it’s his line of business,”

  said the dying German-Jewish poet in his garret.

  The little girl saw her first troop parade and asked,

  “What are those?”

  “Soldiers.”

  “What are soldiers?”

  “They are for war. They fight and each tries to kill

  as many of the other side as he can.”

  The girl held still and studied.

  “Do you know . . . I know something?”

  “Yes, what is it you know?”

  “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”

  One of the early Chicago poets,

  One of the slouching underslung Chicago poets,

  Having only the savvy God gave him,

  Lacking a gat, lacking brass knucks,

  Having one lead pencil to spare, wrote:

  “I am credulous about the destiny of man,

  and I believe more than I can ever prove

  of the future of the human race

  and the importance of illusions,

  the value of great expectations.

  I would like to be in the same moment

  an earthworm (which I am) and

  a rider to the m
oon (which I am).”

  24

  Who shall speak for the people?

  who has the answers?

  where is the sure interpreter?

  who knows what to say?

  Who can write the music jazz-classical

  smokestacks-geraniums hyacinths-biscuits

  now whispering easy

  now boom doom crashing angular

  now tough monotonous tom tom

  Who has enough split-seconds and slow sea-tides?

  The ships of the sea and the mists of

  night and the sheen of old battlefields

  and the moon on the city

  rubbish dumps belong to the people.

  The crops this year, last and next year,

  and the winds and frosts in many

  orchards and tomato gardens, are

  listed in the people’s acquaintance.

  Horses and wagons, trucks and tractors,

  from the shouting cities to the sleeping

  prairies, from worn pavements

  to mountain mule paths, the people

  have strange possessions.

  The plow and the hammer, the knife and

  the shovel, the planting hoe and the

  reaping sickle, everywhere these are

  the people’s possessions by right of

  use.

  Their handles are smoothed to the grain

  of the wood by the enclosing

  thumbs and fingers of familiar

  hands,

  Maintenance-of-way men in a Tennessee

  gang singing, “If I die a railroad

  man put a pick and shovel at my

  head and my feet and a nine-pound

  hammer in my hand,”

  Larry, the Kansas section boss, on his

  dying bed asking for one last look at

  the old hand-car,

  His men saying in the coffin on his chest

  he should by rights have the spike

  maul, the gauge and the old claw-bar.

  The early morning in the fields, the

  brown thrush warbling and the imitations

  of the catbird, the neverending

  combat with pest and destroyer,

  the chores of feeding and watching,

  seedtime and harvest,

  The clocking of the months toward a

  birthing day, the newly dropped

  calves and the finished steers loaded

  in stock-cars for market, the gamble

  on what we’ll get tomorrow for

  what we put in today—

  These are belongings of the people, dusty

  with the dust of earth, merciless as

  sudden hog cholera, hopeful as a

  rainwashed hill of moonlit pines.

  25

  “You do what you must—this world and then the next—one world at a time.”

  The grain gamblers and the price manipulators and the stockmarket players put their own twist on the text: In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread.

  The day’s work in the factory, mill, mine—the whistle, the bell, the alarm clock, the timekeeper and the paycheck, your number on the assembly line, what the night shift says when the day shift comes—the blood of years paid out for finished products proclaimed on billboards yelling at highway travellers in green valleys—

  These are daily program items, values of blood and mind in the everyday rituals of the people.

  26

  You can drum on immense drums

  the monotonous daily motions of the people

  taking from earth and air

  their morsels of bread and love,

  a carryover from yesterday into tomorrow.

  You can blow on great brass horns

  the awful clamors of war and revolution

  when swarming anonymous shadowshapes

  obliterate old names Big Names

  and cross out what was

  and offer what is on a fresh blank page.

  27

  In the folded and quiet yesterdays

  Put down in the book of the past

  Is a scrawl of scrawny thumbs

  And a smudge of clutching fingers

  And the breath of hanged men,

  Of thieves and vagabonds,

  Of killers saying welcome as an ax fell,

  Of traitors cut in four pieces

  And their bowels thrust over their faces

  According to the ancient Anglo-Saxon

  Formula for the crime of treason,

  Of persons covered with human filth

  In due exaction of a penalty,

  Of ears clipped, noses slit, fingers chopped

  For the identification of vagrants,

  Of loiterers and wanderers seared

  “with a hot iron in the breast the mark V,”

  Of violence as a motive lying deep

  As the weather changes of the sea,

  Of gang wars, tong wars, civil tumults,

  Industrial strife, international mass murders,

  Of agitators outlawed to live on thistles,

  Of thongs for holding plainspoken men,

  Of thought and speech being held a crime,

  And a woman burned for saying,

  “I listen to my Voices and obey them,”

  And a thinker locked into stone and iron

  For saying, “The earth moves,”

  And the pity of men learning by shocks,

  By pain and practice,

  By plunges and struggles in a bitter pool.

  In the folded and quiet yesterdays

  how many times has it happened?

  The leaders of the people estimated as to price

  And bought with bribes signed and delivered

  Or waylaid and shot or meshed by perjurers

  Or hunted and sent into hiding

  Or taken and paraded in garments of dung,

  Fire applied to their footsoles:

  “Now will you talk?”

  Their mouths basted with rubber hose:

  “Now will you talk?”

  Thrown into solitary, fed on slops, hung by thumbs,

  Till the mention of that uprising is casual, so-so,

  As though the next revolt breeds somewhere

  In the bowels of that mystic behemoth, the people.

  “And when it comes again,” say watchers, “we are ready.”

  How many times

  in the folded and quiet yesterdays

  has it happened?

  “You may burn my flesh and bones

  and throw the ashes to the four winds.”

  smiled one of them,

  “Yet my voice shall linger on