For fifty years,
Cruel, insatiable Old World,
You have punched me over the heart
Till you made me cough blood.
The few paltry things I gathered
You snatched out of my hands.
You have knocked the cup from my thirsty lips.
You have laughed at my hunger of body and soul.
You look at me now and think,
"He is still strong,
There ought to be twenty more years of good punching there.
At the end of that time he will be old and broken,
Not able to strike back,
But cringing and crying for leave
To live a little longer."
Those twenty, pitiful, extra years
Soul: There is no stronger thing than song;
In sun and rain and leafy trees
It wafts the timid soul along
On crested waves of melodies.
Body: But leaves the body bare to feed
Its hunger with its very need.
Soul: Although the frenzied belly writhes,
Yet render up in song your tithes;
Song is the weakling’s oaken rod,
His Jacob’s ladder dropped from God.
Body: Song is not drink; song is not meat,
Nor strong, thick shoes for naked feet.
Soul: Who sings by unseen hands is fed
With honeyed milk and warm, white bread;
His ways in pastures green are led,
And perfumed oil illumes his head;
I WILL keep you and bring hands to hold you against
a great hunger.
I will run a spear in you for a great gladness to die
with.
I will stab you between the ribs of the left side with
a great love worth remembering.
The pawn-shop man knows hunger.
And how far hunger has eaten the heart
Of one who comes with an old keepsake.
Here are wedding rings and baby bracelets,
Scarf pins and shoe buckles, jeweled garters,
Old-fashioned knives with inlaid handles.
Watches of old gold and silver,
Old coins worn with finger-marks.
They tell stories.
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
Passing through huddled and ugly walls
By doorways where women
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city's edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves breaking under the sun
On a spray-flung curve of shore ;
And a fluttering storm of gulls,
Masses of great gray wings
And flying white bellies
Veering and wheeling free in the open.
Down between the walls of shadow
Where the iron laws insist,
The hunger voices mock.
The worn wayfaring men
With the hunched and humble shoulders,
Throw their laughter into toil.