The People, Yes Read online

  “When the wind favors you can smell a slave-ship

  seven miles,” they said in days now gone.

  “Baby, baby, you will get new shoes at the gate of

  heaven,” sing the Mexican mothers to the muchacho.

  “How are crops this year?”

  “Not so good for a good year

  but not so bad for a bad year.”

  “Didn’t you hear me holler for help?”

  “Yes but you’re such a liar

  I didn’t think you meant it.”

  What about that railroad engineer

  running on the Pennsy

  twenty-two years out of Chicago

  leaving his mother $12,000

  directing in his will

  they should burn his body

  as a piece of rolling-stock

  beyond rehabilitation or repair

  and take the ashes to his pet locomotive

  and when they had run her

  to the Beverly curve at 87th Street

  where the open prairie view was special

  and his eyes had so often

  met a changing sky of red and gold—

  there from the old cab of locomotive No. 8152

  they could empty his firebox

  they could throw his ashes

  strew the last cinders and clinkers

  of an engineer, an old hogger

  thankful he had lived—

  Always when he had rounded that curve

  his run was over and he could go home—

  What did he have?

  They obliged him. Why shouldn’t they?

  They were glad to. “But he was peculiar, wasn’t he?”

  “Haven’t you had a little too much?” the White House guard asked the Sioux warrior who shifted a blanket: “A little too much is just enough.”

  When Chicago has a debate whether there is a hell someone always says, “Down in hell they debate whether there is a Chicago.”

  “Too bad you have to work in this kind of a soup parlor,” the customer sympathized, the waiter refusing the sympathy: “I work here but I don’t eat here.”

  A short order lunch room in Waterloo hangs up a sign for visiting Hawkeyes: “We eat our own hash—think it over.”

  A college boarding house in Ann Arbor instructs the scissorbill: “God hates a glutton—learn to say No.”

  The slim little wiry Texas Ranger answering a riot call heard from the town committee that they certainly expected at least a company of troopers, which brought his query, “There’s only one riot—isn’t there?”

  “Are you happy?” the evangelist asked the new half-convert. “Well, parson, I’m not damn happy, just happy, that’s all.”

  49

  He was a king or a shah, an ahkoond or rajah,

  the head man of the country,

  and he commanded the learned men of the books

  they must put all their books in one,

  which they did,

  and this one book into a single page,

  which they did.

  “Suppose next,” said the head man, who was

  either a king or shah, an ahkoond or rajah,

  “Suppose now you give my people

  the history of the world and its peoples

  in three words—come, go to work!”

  And the learned men sat long into the night

  and confabulated over their ponderings

  and brought back three words:

  “Born,

  troubled,

  died.”

  This was their history of Everyman.

  “Give me next for my people,” spoke the head man,

  “in one word the inside kernel of all you know,

  the knowledge of your ten thousand books

  with a forecast of what will happen next—

  this for my people in one word.”

  And again they sat into the peep of dawn

  and the arguments raged

  and the glass prisms of the chandeliers shook

  and at last they came to a unanimous verdict

  and brought the head man one word:

  “Maybe.”

  And in that country and in other countries

  over mountain ranges where white clouds rested

  and beyond the blue sea and its endless tumblers

  the people by sunlight, by candlelight, by lanterns

  by the new white bulbs spoken to with buttons,

  the people had sayings touching the phrase

  “Born, troubled, died,”

  carrying farther the one word: “maybe,”

  spacing values between serenity and anguish,

  from daily humdrum and the kitchen stove

  to the inevitable rainbow or evening star,

  sayings:

  What should I say when it is better to say nothing?

  What is said is said and no sponge can wipe it out.

  Ask the young people—they know everything.

  They say-what say they? Let them say.

  Have you noticed painted flowers give no smell?

  A woman and a melon are not to be known by their outsides,

  The handsomest woman can give only what she has.

  The miser and the pig are no use till dead.

  An old man in love is a flower in winter.

  Bean by bean we All the sack.

  Step by step one goes far.

  No matter how important you are, you may get the measles.

  Wash a dog, comb a dog, still a dog.

  Fresh milk is not to be had from a statue.

  Apes may put on finery but they are still apes.

  Every man must eat his peek of dirt before he dies.

  God knows well who are the best pilgrims.

  The ache for glory sends free people into slavery.

  He who is made of honey will be eaten to death by flies.

  No matter how cheap you make shoes geese will go barefoot.

  He drives the wind from his house with his hat.

  Wedlock is a padlock.

  Take a good look at the mother before

  getting tied up with the daughter.

  Let a mother be ever so bad she wishes

  her daughter to be good.

  The man hardly ever marries the woman

  he jokes about: she often marries the

  man she laughs at.

  Keep your eyes open before marriage,

  half-shut afterward.

  In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

  Even if your stomach be strong, eat as few

  cockroaches as possible.

  The curse of the Spanish gypsy: May you be

  a mail carrier and have sore feet.

  Well lathered is half shaved.

  A wife is not a guitar you hang on the wall after playing it.

  The liar forgets.

  A redheaded man in the orchestra is a sure sign

  of trouble.

  The shabby genteel would better be in rags.

  As sure as God made little apples he was busy

  as a cranberry merchant.

  It will last about as long as a snowball in hell.

  I wouldn’t take a million dollars for this baby and

  I wouldn’t give ten cents for another.

  Blue eyes say love me or I die.

  Black eyes say love me or I kill you.

  The sun rises and sets in her eyes.

  Wishes won’t wash dishes.

  May all your children be acrobats.

  Leave something to wish for.

  Lips however rosy must be fed.

  Some kill with a feather.

  By night all cats are gray.

  Life goes before we know what it is.

  One fool is enough in a house.

  Even God gets tired of too much hallelujah.

  Take it easy and live long are brothers.

  The baby’s smile pays the bill

  Yesterday is gone, tomorrow may never co
me,

  today is here.

  The sins of omission are those we should have

  committed and didn’t.

  May you live to pick flowers off your enemies’ graves.

  Some of them are so lazy they get up early in the morning

  so as to have more time to lay around and do nothing.

  Some of them are dirty as a slut that’s too lazy to lick herself.

  Let the guts be full for they carry the legs.

  The hypocrite talks like a saint and hides his cat claws.

  The half-wit was asked how he found the lost horse no others

  could locate and explained, “I thought to myself where I

  would go if I was a horse and I went there and he had.”

  He who has one foot in a brothel has another in a hospital.

  When the boy is growing he has a wolf in his belly.

  Handsome women generally fall into the hands of men not worth

  a second look.

  When someone hits you with a rock hit him with a piece of

  cotton.

  Love your neighbor as yourself but don’t take down your fence.

  A fence should be horse-high, pig-tight, bull-strong.

  Except in fairy stories the bashful get less.

  A beggar’s hand has no bottom.

  Polite words open iron gates.

  Be polite but not too polite.

  50

  From what graveyards and sepulchers have they come,

  these given the public eye and ear

  who chatter idly of their personal success

  as though they flowered by themselves alone

  saying “I,” “I,” “I,”

  crediting themselves with advances and gains,

  “I did this, I did that,”

  and hither and thither, “It was me, Me,”

  the people, yes, the people, being omitted

  or being mentioned as incidental

  or failing completely of honorable mention,

  as though what each did was by him alone

  and there is a realm of personal achievement

  wherein he was the boss, the big boy,

  and it wasn’t luck nor the breaks

  nor a convenient public

  but it was him, “I,” “Me,”

  and the idea and the inference is

  the pay and the praise should be his—

  from what graveyards have they strolled

  and do they realize their sepulchral manners

  and what are the farther backgrounds?

  Desecrate the landscape with your billboards, gentlemen,

  Let no green valleys meet the beholder’s eye without

  Your announcements of gas, oil, beans, soup, whiskey, beer,

  Your proclamations of shaving cream, tooth-paste, pills, tonics.

  On the rocks and rugged hills, along clear streams and pastures

  Set up your billboard brag and swagger, your raucous yells.

  Desecrate the landscape, gentlemen, go to it, hit ’em in the eye.

  Sell ’em. Make ’em eat it. Sell ’em the name, the idea, the habit.

  If a rock stands proud and grand anywhere sling your signs up

  on it.

  The machine yes the machine

  never wastes anybody’s time

  never watches the foreman

  never talks back

  never talks what is right or wrong

  never listens to others talking or if

  it does listen it doesn’t hear

  never says we’ve been thinking, or, our

  feeling is like this

  the machine yes the machine cuts your production cost

  a man is a man and what can you do with him?

  but a machine now you take a machine

  no kids no woman never hungry never thirsty

  all a machine needs is a little regular attention and plenty of

  grease.

  We raise more com

  to feed more hogs

  to buy more land

  to raise more com

  to feed more hogs

  to . . .

  Once there was a frontier. Year by year it moved west. At last it moved into the Pacific Ocean. Word passed, “The frontier is gone, there is no frontier any more.” From then on no more frontiersmen, from then on only jokers advising, “Go west, young man.” This was long after the old-timers started west in covered wagons emblazoned “Ho for California” “Oregon or Death” or “The Eleventh Commandment: Mind Your Own Business.” One with a sign reading “Pikes Peak or Bust” came back with another: “Busted by Gosh!” And you can go now yes go now though the old frontiers are gone and the free homesteads are few. Now you can stay where you are and send up rockets, let down buckets. Now with less land you will have less children.

  What happened in that buried city they

  found in Africa?

  Once it had streets and people and business

  and politics.

  Once it saw the weddings of young men and

  women

  And the children cried “mama” as the first

  word

  And they had news from day to day of food,

  love, work, people.

  Now it is covered over with a level of snails,

  hills of snails.

  The streets, houses, city hall, department of

  public works,

  Houses of money lenders, huts of the poor,

  tabernacles,

  Filled up and smoothed over by long processions

  of snails,

  Legions of plodding thoughtless misbegotten

  snails.

  “Isn’t that an iceberg on the horizon, Captain?”

  “Yes, Madam.”

  “What if we get in a collision with it?”

  “The iceberg, Madam, will move right along

  as though nothing had happened.”

  You can’t come back to a home unless it was a

  home you went away from.

  Between hay and grass neither one nor the other.

  Can’t you be useful as well as ornamental?

  Why don’t you go roll a peanut around the corner?

  When did they let you out?

  The mules went to ask horns and came back without ears.

  When you get hold of a good thing freeze onto it.

  Nothing to do and all day to do it in.

  So dumb he spent his last dollar buying a pocketbook to put it in

  A little more sandpaper and this will be smooth.

  Write on one side of the paper and both sides of the subject.

  Swear to it on a stack of Bibles and they wouldn’t believe you.