Sun-Up, and Other Poems Part 8

The girl with adenoids rocks on her hams.

A torrent of song strains at her throat, gurgles, rushes, gouges her blocked pipes.

Her feet beat a wild tattoo-- head flung back and pelvis lifting to the white body of the sun.

Mates now, these two-- G.o.ddess and G.o.d....

Marchons!

Only the power machines drone with metallic docility under the flaxen head of the foreman poised like an amazed gull.

II

To-day little French merchant men with pointed beards and fat American merchant men without any beards drive to a feast of b.u.t.tered squabs.

The band... accoutered and neatly caparisoned...

plays the Ma.r.s.eillaise....

And I think of a wild stallion... newly caught...

flanks yet taut and nostrils spread to the smell of a racing mare, hitched to a grocer's cart.

REVEILLE

Come forth, you workers!

Let the fires go cold-- Let the iron spill out, out of the troughs-- Let the iron run wild Like a red bramble on the floors-- Leave the mill and the foundry and the mine And the shrapnel lying on the wharves-- Leave the desk and the shuttle and the loom-- Come, With your ashen lives, Your lives like dust in your hands.

I call upon you, workers.

It is not yet light But I beat upon your doors.

You say you await the Dawn But I say you are the Dawn.

Come, in your irresistible unspent force And make new light upon the mountains.

You have turned deaf ears to others-- Me you shall hear.

Out of the mouths of turbines, Out of the turgid throats of engines, Over the whistling steam, You shall hear me shrilly piping.

Your mills I shall enter like the wind, And blow upon your hearts, Kindling the slow fire.

They think they have tamed you, workers-- Beaten you to a tool To scoop up hot honor Till it be cool-- But out of the pa.s.sion of the red frontiers A great flower trembles and burns and glows And each of its petals is a people.

Come forth, you workers-- Clinging to your stable And your wisp of warm straw-- Let the fires grow cold, Let the iron spill out of the troughs, Let the iron run wild Like a red bramble on the floors....

As our forefathers stood on the prairies So let us stand in a ring, Let us tear up their prisons like gra.s.s And beat them to barricades-- Let us meet the fire of their guns With a greater fire, Till the birds shall fly to the mountains For one safe bough.

TO ALEXANDER BERKMAN

Can you see me, Sasha?

I can see you....

A tentacle of the vast dawn is resting on your face that floats as though detached in a sultry and greenish vapor.

I cannot reach my hands to you...

would not if I could, though I know how warmly yours would close about them.

Why?

I do not know...

I have a sense of shame.

Your eyes hurt me... mysterious openings in the gray stone of your face through which your spirit streams out taut as a flag bearing strange symbols to the new dawn.

If I stay... projected, trembling against these bars filtering emaciated light...

will your eyes... that bore their lonely way through mine...

stop as at a friendly gate...

grow warm... and luminous?

... but I cannot stay... for the smell...

I know... how the days pa.s.s...

The prison squats with granite haunches on the young spring, battened under with its twisting green...

and you... socket for every bolt piercing like a driven nail.

Eyes stare you through the bars...

eyes blank as a graveled yard...

and the silence shuffles heavy dice of feet in iron corridors...

until the day... that has soiled herself in this black hole to caress the pale mask of your face...

withdraws the last wizened ray to wash in the infinite her discolored hands.

Can you hear me, Sasha, in your surrounded darkness?

EMMA GOLDMAN

How should they appraise you, who walk up close to you as to a mountain, each proclaiming his own eyeful against the other's eyeful.

Only time standing well off shall measure your circ.u.mference and height.

AN OLD WORKMAN

Warped... gland-dry...

With spine askew And body shrunken into half its s.p.a.ce...

Well-used as some cracked paving-stone...

Bearing on his grimed and pitted front A stamp... as of innumerable feet.

TO LARKIN

Is it you I see go by the window, Jim Larkin--you not looking at me nor any one, And your shadow swaying from East to West?

Strange that you should be walking free--you shut down without light, And your legs tied up with a knot of iron.

One hundred million men and women go inevitably about their affairs, In the somnolent way Of men before a great drunkenness....

They do not see you go by their windows, Jim Larkin, With your eyes b.l.o.o.d.y as the sunset And your shadow gaunt upon the sky...

You, and the like of you, that life Is crus.h.i.+ng for their frantic wines.

WIND RISING IN THE ALLEYS

Wind rising in the alleys My spirit lifts in you like a banner streaming free of hot walls.

You are full of unspent dreams....

You are laden with beginnings....

There is hope in you... not sweet... acrid as blood in the mouth.

Come into my tossing dust Scattering the peace of old deaths, Wind rising in the alleys, Carrying stuff of flame.