You — and you. Passer-by — and you;
You, languid feet, and you, wild to climb,
Seeking your respite or star-rimmed view.
Where do you go down the streets of Time?
Never the same, yet ever the same —
You and you, hurrying, slow.
Crowding the way with your motley claim
Of life, always you come and go.
You, stung with purpose. You, driven by
Blindly before Creation's sweep.
Are there ways for the searchers of stars on high?
And other ways for the seekers of sleep?
Or only one way for all to run? ...
Only one sound drifts up to me,
The blend of every tread in one.
Impersonal as the beat of the sea.
We like to listen to her dress,
It makes a whisper by her feet.
Her little pointed shoes are gray;
She hardly lets them touch the street.
Sometimes she has a crumpled fan.
Her hat is silvered on the crown.
And there are roses by the brim
That nod and tremble up and down.
She comes along the pavement walk,
And in a moment she is gone.
She hardly ever looks at us,
But once she smiled and looked at John.
And so we run to see her pass
And watch her through the fence, and I
Can hear the others whispering,
"Miss Josephine is going by."
Hollow rang the house when I knocked on the door,
And I lingered on the threshold with my hand
Upraised to knock and knock once more:
Listening for the sound of her feet across the floor,
Hollow re-echoed my heart.
The low-hung lamps stretched down the road
With shadows drifting underneath,
With a music of soft, melodious feet
Quickening my hope as I hastened to meet
The low-hung light of her eyes.
The golden lamps down the street went out,
The last car trailed the night behind;
And I in the darkness wandered about
With a flutter of hope and of dark-shut doubt
In the dying lamp of my love.
Two brown ponies trotting slowly
I hear the halting footsteps of a lass
In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall
Its veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass
To bend and barter at desire’s call.
Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet
Go prowling through the night from street to street!
Through the long night until the silver break
Of day the little gray feet know no rest;
Through the lone night until the last snow-flake
Has dropped from heaven upon the earth’s white breast,
The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet
Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street.
Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way
Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace,
Has pushed the timid little feet of clay,
The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!
Six street ends come together here.
They feed people and wagons into the center.
In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags,
Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby buggies.
Six ends of streets and no sleep for them all day.
The people and wagons come and go, out and in.
Triangles of banks and drug stores watch.
The policemen whistle, the trolley cars bump :
Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day.
In the false dawn when the chickens blink
And the east shakes a lazy baby toe at to-morrow,
And the east fixes a pink half-eye this way,
In the time when only one milk wagon crosses
These three streets, these six street ends,
It is the sleep time and they rest.
I WANDER down on Clinton street south of Polk
And listen to the voices of Italian children quarreling.
It is a cataract of coloratura
And I could sleep to their musical threats and accusations.
PIETRO has twenty red and blue balloons on a string.
They flutter and dance pulling Pietro's arm.
A nickel apiece is what they sell for.
Wishing children tag Pietro's heels.
He sells out and goes the streets alone.
I WALKED among the streets of an old city and the
streets were lean as the throats of hard seafish
soaked in salt and kept in barrels many years.
How old, how old, how old, we are : — the walls went
on saying, street walls leaning toward each other
like old women of the people, like old midwives
tired and only doing what must be done.
The greatest the city could offer me, a stranger, was
statues of the kings, on all corners bronzes of
kings — ancient bearded kings who wrote books
and spoke of God's love for all people — and young
kings who took forth armies out across the frontiers
splitting the heads of their opponents and
enlarging their kingdoms.
Strangest of all to me, a stranger in this old city, was
I KNOW a Jew fish crier down on Maxwell Street with a
voice like a north wind blowing over corn stubble
in January.
He dangles herring before prospective customers evincing
a joy identical with that of Pavlowa dancing.
His face is that of a man terribly glad to be selling fish,
terribly glad that God made fish, and customers to
whom he may call his wares from a pushcart.
Among the shadows where two streets cross,
A woman lurks in the dark and waits
To move on when a policeman heaves in view.
Smiling a broken smile from a face
Painted over haggard bones and desperate eyes,
All night she offers passers-by what they will
Of her beauty wasted, body faded, claims gone.
And no takers.
Flowers all natural sweet.
That women sell on baskets in the street,
Lose half their beauty in my eyes.
They are a huckster's merchandise.
Who offers, then, to buy from me
That natural service, my maternity?
They have watered the street,
It shines in the glare of lamps,
Cold, white lamps,
And lies
Like a slow-moving river,
Barred with silver and black.
Cabs go down it,
One,
And then another.
Between them I hear the shuffling of feet.
Tramps doze on the window-ledges,
Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks.
The city is squalid and sinister,
With the silver-barred street in the midst,
Slow-moving,
A river leading nowhere.