The People, Yes Read online

  with holes.

  A pound of iron or a pound of feathers weighs the same.

  Those in fear they may cast pearls before swine are often lacking

  in pearls.

  May you live to eat the hen that scratches over your grave.

  He seems to think he’s the frog’s tonsils but he looks to me like a

  plugged nickel.

  If you don’t like the coat bring back the vest and I’ll give you a

  pair of pants.

  The coat and the pants do the work but the vest gets the gravy.

  “You are singing an invitation to summer,” said the teacher, “you are not defying it to come.”

  “Sargeant, if a private calls you

  a dam fool, what of it?”

  “I’d throw him in the guard house.”

  “And if he just thinks you’re a dam

  fool and don’t say it, then what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, let it go at that.”

  The white man drew a small circle in the sand

  and told the red man, “This is what the Indian

  knows,” and drawing a big circle around the

  small one, “This is what the white man knows.”

  The Indian took the stick and swept an immense

  ring around both circles: “This is where the

  white man and the red man know nothing.”

  On the long dirt road from Nagadoches to Austin

  the pioneer driving a yoke of oxen and a cart

  met a heavy man in a buggy driving a team

  of glossy black horses.

  “I am Sam Houston, Governor of the State of Texas,

  and I order you to turn out of the road for me.”

  “I am an American citizen and a taxpayer of Texas

  and I have as much right to the road as you.”

  “That is an intelligent answer and I salute you

  and I will turn out of the road for you.”

  What did they mean with that Iowa epitaph:

  “She averaged well for this vicinity”?

  And why should the old Des Moines editor

  say they could write on his gravestone:

  “He et what was sot before him”?

  “I never borrowed your umbrella,” said a

  borrower, “and if I did I brought it back.”

  He was quiet as a wooden-legged man on a tin

  roof and busy as a one-armed paper-hanger

  with the hives.

  When a couple of fried eggs were offered the

  new hired man he said, “I don’t dirty my

  plate for less than six.”

  Why did the top sergeant tell the rookie, “Put

  on your hat, here comes a woodpecker”?

  “Whiskey,” taunted the Irish orator, “whiskey

  it is that makes you shoot at the landlords

  —and miss ’em!”

  “Unless you learn,” said the father to the son,

  “how to tell a horse chestnut from a chestnut

  horse you may have to live on soup made

  from the shadow of a starved pigeon.”

  Said Oscar neither laughing nor crying: “We fed

  the rats to the cats and the cats to the rats

  and was just getting into the big money when

  the whole thing went blooey on account of the

  overproduction of rats and cats.”

  Where you been so long?

  What good wind blew you in?

  Snow again, kid, I didn’t get your drift.

  Everything now is either swell or lousy.

  “It won’t be long now,” was answered,

  “The worst is yet to come.”

  Of the dead merchant prince whose holdings

  were colossal the ditch-digger queried,

  “How much did he leave? All of it.”

  “What do you want to be?”

  T. R. asked.

  Bruere answered, “Just an

  earthworm turning over a

  little of the soil near me.”

  “Great men never feel great,”

  say the Chinese.

  “Small men never feel small.”

  33

  Remember the chameleon. He was a well-behaved chameleon and nothing could be brought against his record. As a chameleon he had done the things that should have been done and left undone the things that should have been left undone. He was a first-class unimpeachable chameleon and nobody had anything on him. But he came to a Scotch plaid and tried to cross it. In order to cross he had to imitate sue different yam colors, first one and then another and back to the first or second. He was a brave chameleon and died at the crossroads true to his chameleon instincts.

  What kind of a liar are you?

  People lie because they don’t remember clear what they saw.

  People lie because they can’t help making a story better than it was the way it happened.

  People tell “white lies” so as to be decent to others.

  People lie in a pinch, hating to do it, but lying on because it might be worse.

  And people lie just to be liars for a crooked personal gain.

  What sort of a liar are you?

  Which of these liars are you?

  34

  If you can imagine love letters written back and forth between Mary Magdalene and Judas Iscariot, if you can see Napoleon dying and saying he was only a sawdust emperor and an imitation of the real thing, if you can see judges step down from the bench and take death sentences from murderers sitting in black robes, if you can see big thieves protected by law acknowledging to petty thieves handcuffed and convicted that they are both enemies of society, if you can vision an opposite for every reality, then you can shake hands with yourself and murmur, “Pardon my glove, what were we saying when interrupted?”

  35

  The sea moves always, the wind moves always.

  They want and want and there is no end to their wanting.

  What they sing is the song of the people.

  Man will never arrive, man will be always on the way.

  It is written he shall rest but never for long.

  The sea and the wind tell him he shall be lonely, meet love, be

  shaken with struggle, and go on wanting.

  “When I was born in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital,” said the pioneer’s grandson, “there was a surgeon with multiple instruments, two nurses in starched uniforms with silk, gauze, antiseptics, and the obliterating cone of the grateful anesthesia. When my grandfather was born in the naked corn-lands of Nebraska there was only a granny woman with a few clean rags and a pail of warm water.”

  You can go now yes go now. Go east or west, go north or south, you can go now. Or you can go up or go down now. And after these there is no place to go. If you say no to all of them then you stay here. You don’t go. You are fixed and put. And from here if you choose you send up rockets, you let down buckets. Here then for you is the center of things.

  36

  “I am zero, naught, one cipher,”

  meditated the symbol preceding the numbers.

  “Think of nothing. I am the sign of it.

  I am bitter weather, zero.

  In heavy fog the sky ceiling is zero.

  Think of nowhere to go. I am it.

  Those doomed to nothing for today

  and the same nothing for tomorrow,

  those without hits, runs, errors,

  I am their sign and epitaph,

  the goose egg : 0 :

  even the least of these—that is me.”

  When they told those who had no money

  “Save your money”

  Those who had no money flashed back

  “Would you ask those with nothing to eat

  to eat less?”

  “The stairway of time ever echoes

  with the wooden shoe going up

  the polished boot coming down.”

  Ghost an
d rich man:

  “What do you see out of the window?”

  “The people.”

  “And what do you see in the mirror?”

  “Myself.”

  “Yet the glass in the mirror is the

  same only it is silvered.”

  “If I am a queen and you are a queen,

  who fetches the water?” inquire the

  Hindus, the Turks asking: “If you are

  a gentleman and I am a gentleman, who

  will milk the cow?” and the Irish:

  “If you’re a lady and I’m a lady,

  who’ll put the sow out of the house?”

  “The man put green spectacles on his cow and fed her sawdust.

  Maybe she would believe it was grass.

  But she didn’t. She died on him.”

  When the horses gagged at going farther up the steep hill, the driver shouted:

  “First class passengers, keep your seats.

  Second class passengers, get out and walk.

  Third class passengers, get out and shove.”

  Said the scorpion of hate: “The poor hate the rich. The rich hate the poor. The south hates the north. The west hates the east. The workers hare their bosses. The bosses hate their workers, The country hates the towns. The towns hate the country. We are a house divided against itself. We are millions of hands raised against each other. We are united in but one aim—getting the dollar. And when we get the dollar we employ it to get more dollars.”

  37

  “So you want to divide all the money there is

  and give every man his share?”

  “That’s it. Put it all in one big pile and split

  it even for everybody.”

  “And the land, the gold, silver, oil, copper, you want

  that divided up?”

  “Sure—an even whack for all of us.”

  “Do you mean that to go for horses and cows?”

  “Sure—why not?”

  “And how about pigs?”

  “Oh to hell with you—you know I got a couple of

  pigs.”

  In the night and the mist these voices:

  What is mine is mine and I am going to keep it.

  What is yours is yours and you are welcome to keep it.

  You will have to fight me to take from me what is mine.

  Part of what is mine is yours and you are welcome to it.

  What is yours is mine and I am going to take it from you.

  In the night and the mist

  the voices meet

  as the clash of steel on steel

  Over the rights of possession and control and the points:

  what is mine? what is yours?

  and who says so?

  The poor were divided into

  the deserving and the undeserving

  and a pioneer San Franciscan lacked words:

  “It’s hard enough to be poor

  but to be poor and undeserving . . .”

  He saw the slumborn illborn wearyborn

  from fathers and mothers the same

  out of rooms dank with rot

  and scabs, rags, festerings, tubercles, chancres,

  the very doorways quavering,

  “What’s the use?”

  “I came to a country,”

  said a wind-bitten vagabond,

  “where I saw shoemakers barefoot

  saying they had made too many shoes.

  I met carpenters living outdoors

  saying they had built too many houses.

  Clothing workers I talked with,

  bushelmen and armhole-basters,

  said their coats were on a ragged edge

  because they had made too many coats.

  And I talked with farmers, yeomanry,

  the backbone of the country,

  so they were told,

  saying they were in debt and near starvation

  because they had gone ahead like always

  and raised too much wheat and com

  too many hogs, sheep, cattle.

  When I said, ‘You live in a strange country,’

  they answered slow, like men

  who wouldn’t waste anything, not even language:

  ‘You ain’t far wrong there, young feller.

  We’re going to do something, we don’t know what.’”

  The drowning man in the river

  answered the man on the bridge:

  “I don’t want to die,

  I’ll lose my job in the molding room of

  the Malleable Iron and Castings Works.”

  And the living man on the bridge

  hotfooted to the molding room foreman

  of the Malleable Iron and Castings Works

  and got a short answer:

  “You’re ten minutes late. The man who

  pushed that fellow off the bridge

  is already on the job.”

  “What do you want?” a passing stranger asked

  a County Kerry farmer.

  “What is it I’m wantin’? Me byes and girruls

  is gone. The rain has rotted the prathies.

  The landlord has taken me pig for the rint.

  All I’m wantin’ is the Judgment Day.”

  “The poor of the earth hide themselves together,” wrote Job meaning in those days too they had a shantytown.

  “As wild asses in the wilderness they must go forth, to seek food as their task,” wrote Job meaning then too they carried the banner and hoped to connect with board and clothes somehow.

  “In a field not theirs they harvest,” wrote Job as though in Judea then the frontier was gone, as now in America instead of free homesteads the signs say: No Trespassing.

  “The weaklings groan and the souls of the wounded cry for help,” wrote Job taking special notice of those “forced to garner the vineyard of the wicked one,” mentioning footless wanderers of Bible times as though the devices of men then too had an edge against the propertyless.

  In the Sunflower State 1928 Anno Domini

  a Jayhawker sunburnt and gaunt

  drove to a loading platform

  and took what he got for his hogs

  and spoke before two other hog raisers:

  “Everything’s lopsided.

  “I raise hogs and the railroads and the banks take them away

  from me and I get hit in the hind end.

  “The more hogs I raise the worse my mortgages look.

  “I try to sleep and I hear those mortgages gnawing in the night like rats in a corn crib.

  “I want to shoot somebody but I don’t know who.

  “We’ll do something. You wait and see.

  “We don’t have to stand for this skin game if we’re free Americans.”

  “Get off this estate.”

  “What for?”

  “Because it’s mine.”

  “Where did you get it?”