Winds of Another Sphere
"America," capitalism, decay on the one hand; communism, purity, healing on the other .
Let us admit into our land the winds
blowing from the east and the voices wafted
with them, the voices attendant on the spheres
in which we too shall inevitably whirl.
something in our land is dying:
... the way we wearily smile,
the way we half-heartedly hail a comrade in the street
the way we dismally work in factories and mills
and railroads spanning the land
winds of another sphere , cleanse our winds
and the voices wafted will be our voices.
corrosion sears our land , ...
America is big
and trees and crags and skies are permanent ...
factories and mills
and railroads spanning the land
1931
Homage to Karl Marx
the charted skies/ (charted by him, for us-- his inheritors!)
In his great rooms, the countries of the world--
...How many hands,
dripping with blood, the torment of numberless men,
crept across boundaries at night, the fingers feeling their way
into his moments of peace ?
the prophet grappling with worlds,
suspended between
yet rooted in both
the old and the new.
His dialectic enervates the doomed,
inspires the mass to courage: not for long
can our foes delay our unfolding destiny!
left him at last, broken in strength, to die .
But late, too late to check him, too irrevocably decayed
to wreck his shining pyramid, too weak with history
(the weakness of those who die knowing death is certain)
to pierce the impregnable fortress of his work."
1933
Season of Death
This is the sixth winter:
this is the season of death
when lungs contract and the breath of homeless men
freezes on restaurant window panes---men seeking
the sight of rare food
before the head is lowered into the upturned collar
and the shoulders haunched and the shuffling feet
move away slowly, slowly disappear
into a darkened street.This is the season when rents go up:
men die, and their dying is casual.
I walk along a street, returning
at midnight from my unit. Meet a man
leaning against an illumined wall
and ask him for a light.
His open eyes
stay fixed on mine. And cold rain falling
trickles down his nose, his chin.
"Buddy," I begin...and look more closely--
and flee in horror from the corpse's grin.The eyes pursue you even in sleep and
when you awake they stare at your from the ceiling;
you see the dead face peering from your shoes;
the eggs at Thompson's are the dead man's eyes.
Work dims them for eight hours, but then--
the machines silent--they appear again.Along the docks, in the terminals, in the subway, on the street,
in restaurants--the eyes
are focused from the river
among the floating garbage
that other men fish for,
their hands around poles
almost in prayer--
wanting to live,
wanting to live! who also soon
will stand propped by death against a stone-cold wall.1935
To My Contemporaries
the huge sweeping movement of his brain
(rooted in poverty, love as great as deep
as he was poor) unhindered ...
... deceptive, the flowers a fraud ,
the streams polluted. To live here is a lie .
Escape from chaos is impossible ;
the world's too muddled .
... fragmentary feelings, thought-lines that balk,
grow twisted, fade before they reach their ends .
... too stirred to trace this strangeness to its source.
where's the victory?
Chinese peasants seizing arms and bread,
in Mexico they fashion dolls of clay
, chimneys spout red leaflets in Berlin,
Italian flyers bomb the land with calls
of Avanti popolo!
...
create a village-suburb in the brain:
partition in the skull, decree which part
shall live, observe, feel joy and pain,
and which vast area grow dulled,
the senses, all awareness, killed .
...
You, Funaroff, and Hayes , and the others:
enter with me the farthest regions
of space and time, the body moving
across huge continents, the brain surveying
the contours of the land, destroying
the cancerous trees and men, restoring
the spark to bodies overwhelmed
by drudgery and dross and dust.
Blueprint the hills and rivers, mark
the meadows and the factories.
