Am meisten gelesen ▸
Frank Marshall Davis
Here in this fat city
Men seventy-two inches short
Have frozen their dreams
Into steel and concrete
Six hundred feet tall
Thin fingers
On the hard hand
Of Chicago's loop
Are these skyscrapers
Rubbing bright sides
Of rainbow stars
Tearing the gray gauze
Of low clouds
Dipping in the sizzling pot
Of a summer sun
Passing the jeweled moon
Skyscrapers... remote, unpartisan...
Turning neither to the right nor left
Your imperturbable fronts....
Austerely greeting the sun
With one chilly finger of stone....
I know your secrets... better than all the policemen
like fat blue mullet along the avenues.
Aren't there bigger things to talk about
Than a window in Greenwich Village
And hyacinths sprouting
Like little puce poems out of a sick soul?
Some cosmic hearsay--
As to whom--it can't be Mars! put the moon--that way....
Or what winds do to canyons
Under the tall stars...
Or even
How that old roué, Neptune,
Cranes over his bald-head moons
At the twinkling heel of a sky-scraper.
HATS, where do you belong?
what is under you?
On the rim of a skyscraper's forehead
I looked down and saw : hats : fifty thousand hats:
Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle and
waterfalls,
Stopping with a silence of sea grass, a silence of
prairie corn.
Hats: tell me your high hopes.
I PAINTED on the roof of a skyscraper.
I painted a long while and called it a day's work.
The people on a corner swarmed and the traffic cop's whistle never let up all afternoon.
They were the same as bugs, many bugs on their way —
Those people on the go or at a standstill ;
And the traffic cop a spot of blue, a splinter of brass,
Where the black tides ran around him
And he kept the street. I painted a long while
And called it a day's work.