Then came, Oscar, the time of the guns.
And there was no land for a man, no land for a country,
Unless guns sprang up
And spoke their language.
The how of running the world was all in guns.
The law of a God keeping sea and land apart,
The law of a child sucking milk,
The law of stars held together,
They slept and worked in the heads of men
Making twenty mile guns, sixty mile guns,
Speaking their language
Of no land for a man, no land for a country
Unless . . . guns . . . unless . . . guns.
There was a child wanted the moon shot off the sky, asking a long gun to get the moon, to conquer the insults of the moon, to conquer something, anything, to put it over and win the day,
I SAW a mouth jeering. A smile of melted red iron ran
over it. Its laugh was full of nails rattling. It
was a child's dream of a mouth.
A fist hit the mouth : knuckles of gun-metal driven by an
electric wrist and shoulder. It was a child's dream
of an arm.
The fist hit the mouth over and over, again and again.
The mouth bled melted iron, and laughed its laughter
of nails rattling.
And I saw the more the fist pounded the more the mouth
laughed. The fist is pounding and pounding, and
the mouth answering.
I who saw ten strong young men die anonymously, I who
saw ten old mothers hand over their sons to the
nation anonymously, I who saw ten thousand touch
the sunlit silver finalities of undistinguished human
glory — why do I sneeze sardonically at a bronze
drinking fountain named after one who participated
in the war vicariously and bought ten farms?
They offer you many things,
I a few.
Moonlight on the play of fountains at night
With water sparkling a drowsy monotone,
Bare-shouldered, smiling women and talk
And a cross-play of loves and adulteries
And a fear of death
and a remembering of regrets
All this they offer you.
I come with:
salt and bread
a terrible job of work
and tireless war;
Come and have now:
hunger.
danger
Guns on the battle lines have pounded now a year between
Brussels and Paris.
And, William Morris, when I read your old chapter on
the great arches and naves and little whimsical corners
of the Churches of Northern France — Brr-rr!
I'm glad you're a dead man, William Morris, I'm glad
you're down in the damp and mouldy, only a memory
instead of a living man — I'm glad you're gone.
You never lied to us, William Morris, you loved the
shape of those stones piled and carved for you to
dream over and wonder because workmen got joy
of life into them.
Workmen in aprons singing while they hammered, and
praying, and putting their songs and prayers into
the walls and roofs, the bastions and cornerstones
Guns,
Long, steel guns.
Pointed from the war ships
In the name of the war god.
Straight, shining, polished guns,
Clambered over with jackies in white blouses,
Glory of tan faces, tousled hair, white teeth,
Laughing lithe jackies in white blouses,
Sitting on the guns singing war songs, war chanties.
Shovels,
Broad, iron shovels,
Scooping out oblong vaults,
Loosening turf and leveling sod.
I ask you
To witness —
The shovel is brother to the gun.
Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this :
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain ; you put them between walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.
Style — go ahead talking about style.
You can tell where a man gets his style just
as you can tell where Pavlowa got her legs
or Ty Cobb his batting eye.
Go on talking.
Only don't take my style away.
It's my face.
Maybe no good
but anyway, my face.
I talk with it, I sing with it, I see, taste and feel with it,
I know why I want to keep it.
Kill my style
and you break Pavlowa's legs,
and you blind Ty Cobb's batting eye.
Cross the hands over the breast here — so.
Straighten the legs a little more — so.
And call for the wagon to come and take her home.
Her mother will cry some and so will her sisters and
brothers.
But all of the others got down and they are safe and
this is the only one of the factory girls who
wasn't lucky in making the jump when the fire
broke.
It is the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes.
Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the
workmen are beginning the fence.
The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that
can stab the life out of any man who falls on them.
As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble
and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering
children looking for a place to play.
Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go
nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow.
Tomb of a millionaire,
A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,
Place of the dead where they spend every year
The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars
For upkeep and flowers
To keep fresh the memory of the dead.
The merchant prince gone to dust
Commanded in his written will
Over the signed name of his last testament
Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside
For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips.
For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance
Around his last long home.
(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies
to-night.
In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at
Why shall I keep the old name?
What is a name anywhere anyway?
A name is a cheap thing all fathers and mothers leave each child:
A job is a job and I want to live, so
Why does God Almighty or anybody else care whether
I take a new name to go by ?