Lying awake in the ward
Long hours as any must,
I wonder where the dust
Comes from, the Dust, the Dust!
That makes their life so hard,--
The nurses, who must rub
The soon appearing crust
Of green on the bright knob.
And little bits of fluff,
Dull white upon the floor,
Most soft, most curious stuff
That sidles to the door
When no one sees, and makes
Deep wrinkles and heart-breaks;
Light sighs and curses rough.
Oh! if a scientist
As we the withered ferns
By the roadway lying,
Time, the jester, spurns
All our prayers and prying --
All our tears and sighing,
Sorrow, change, and woe --
All our where-and-whying
For friends that come and go.
Life awakes and burns,
Age and death defying,
Till at last it learns
All but Love is dying;
Love's the trade we're plying,
God has willed it so;
Shrouds are what we're buying
For friends that come and go.
And you as well must die, beloved dust,
And all your beauty stand you in no stead;
This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head,
This body of flame and steel, before the gust
Of Death, or under his autumnal frost,
Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead
Than the first leaf that fell,--this wonder fled.
Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost.
Nor shall my love avail you in your hour.
In spite of all my love, you will arise
Upon that day and wander down the air
Obscurely as the unattended flower,
It mattering not how beautiful you were,
Or how beloved above all else that dies.
Heap not on this mound
Roses that she loved so well;
Why bewilder her with roses,
That she cannot see or smell?
She is happy where she lies
With the dust upon her eyes.
Henry got me with child,
Knowing that I could not bring forth life
Without losing my own.
In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.
Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived
That Henry loved me with a husband’s love
But I proclaim from the dust
That he slew me to gratify his hatred.
Dust of my dust,
And dust with my dust,
O, child who died as you entered the world,
Dead with my death!
Not knowing
Breath, though you tried so hard,
With a heart that beat when you lived with me,
And stopped when you left me for Life.
It is well, my child.
For you never traveled
The long, long way that begins with school days,
When little fingers blur under the tears
That fall on the crooked letters.
And the earliest wound, when a little mate
Leaves you alone for another;
And sickness, and the face of
Child of the Aztec gods, how long must we listen here, how long before we go?
The dust is deep on the lintels.
The dust is dark on the doors.
If the dreams shake our bones, what can we say or do?
Since early morning we waited.
Since early, early morning, child.
There must be dreams on the way now.
There must be a song for our bones.
The dust gets deeper and darker.
Do the doors and lintels shudder?
How long must we listen here?
How long before we go?
New neighbors came to the corner house at Congress
and Green streets.
The look of their clean white curtains was the same
as the rim of a nun's bonnet.
One way was an oyster pail factory, one way they
made candy, one way paper boxes, strawboard
cartons.
The warehouse trucks shook the dust of the ways
loose and the wheels whirled dust — there was
dust of hoof and wagon wheel and rubber tire —
dust of police and fire wagons — dust of the winds
that circled at midnights and noon listening to no
prayers.
" O mother, I know the heart of you," I sang passing
the rim of a nun's bonnet — O white curtains — and
people clean as the prayers of Jesus here in the
Blossoms of babies
Blinking their stories
Come soft
On the dusk and the babble ;
Little red gamblers,
Handfuls that slept in the dust.
Summers of rain,
Winters of drift.
Tell off the years ;
And they go back
Who came soft —
Back to the sod,
To silence and dust;
Gray gamblers,
Handfuls again.
Cover me over
In dusk and dust and dreams.
Cover me over
And leave me alone.
Cover me over.
You tireless, great.
Hear me and cover me,
Bringers of dusk and dust and dreams.
Dust of the feet
And dust of the wheels,
Wagons and people going,
All day feet and wheels.
Now. . .
. . Only stars and mist
A lonely policeman.
Two cabaret dancers.
Stars and mist again.
No more feet or wheels.
No more dust and wagons.
Voices of dollars
And drops of blood
Voices of broken hearts,
. . Voices singing, singing,
. . Silver voices, singing,
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.