Written by
Langston Hughes |
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
|
Written by
Marge Piercy |
In flat America, in Chicago,
Graceland cemetery on the German North Side.
Forty feet of Corinthian candle
celebrate Pullman embedded
lonely raisin in a cake of concrete.
The Potter Palmers float
in an island parthenon.
Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat
are postmarked with angels and lambs.
But the Getty tomb: white, snow patterned
in a triangle of trees swims dappled with leaf shadow,
sketched light arch within arch
delicate as fingernail moons.
The green doors should not be locked.
Doors of fern and flower should not be shut.
Louis Sullivan, I sit on your grave.
It is not now good weather for prophets.
Sun eddies on the steelsmoke air like sinking honey.
On the inner green door of the Getty tomb
(a thighbone's throw from your stone)
a marvel of growing, blooming, thrusting into seed:
how all living wreathe and insinuate
in the circlet of repetition that never repeats:
ever new birth never rebirth.
Each tide pool microcosm spiraling from your hand.
Sullivan, you had another five years
when your society would give you work.
Thirty years with want crackling in your hands.
Thirty after years with cities
flowering and turning grey in your beard.
All poets are unemployed nowadays.
My country marches in its sleep.
The past structures a heavy mausoleum
hiding its iron frame in masonry.
Men burn like grass
while armies grow.
Thirty years in the vast rumbling gut
of this society you stormed
to be used, screamed
no louder than any other breaking voice.
The waste of a good man
bleeds the future that's come
in Chicago, in flat America,
where the poor still bleed from the teeth,
housed in sewers and filing cabinets,
where prophets may spit into the wind
till anger sleets their eyes shut,
where this house that dances the seasons
and the braid of all living
and the joy of a man making his new good thing
is strange, irrelevant as a meteor,
in Chicago, in flat America
in this year of our burning.
|
Written by
Robert William Service |
I could have sold him up because
His rent was long past due;
And Grimes, my lawyer, said it was
The proper thing to do:
But how could I be so inhuman?
And me a gentle-woman.
Yet I am poor as chapel mouse,
Pinching to make ends meet,
And have to let my little house
To buy enough to eat:
Why, even now to keep agoing
I have to take in sewing.
Sylvester is a widowed man,
Clerk in a hardware store;
I guess he does the best he can
To feed his kiddies four:
It sure is hard,--don't think it funny,
I've lately loaned him money.
I want to wipe away a tear
Even to just suppose
Some monster of an auctioneer
Might sell his sticks and clothes:
I'd rather want for bread and butter
Than see them in the gutter.
A silly, soft old thing am I,
But oh them kiddies four!
I guess I'll make a raisin pie
And leave it at their door . . .
Some Sunday, dears, you'll share my dream,--
Fried chicken and ice-cream.
|
Written by
Sidney Lanier |
That air same Jones, which lived in Jones,
He had this pint about him:
He'd swear with a hundred sighs and groans,
That farmers MUST stop gittin' loans,
And git along without 'em:
That bankers, warehousemen, and sich
Was fatt'nin' on the planter,
And Tennessy was rotten-rich
A-raisin' meat and corn, all which
Draw'd money to Atlanta:
And the only thing (says Jones) to do
Is, eat no meat that's boughten:
`But tear up every I, O, U,
And plant all corn and swear for true
To quit a-raisin' cotton!'
Thus spouted Jones (whar folks could hear,
-- At Court and other gatherin's),
And thus kep' spoutin' many a year,
Proclaimin' loudly far and near
Sich fiddlesticks and blatherin's.
But, one all-fired sweatin' day,
It happened I was hoein'
My lower corn-field, which it lay
'Longside the road that runs my way
Whar I can see what's goin'.
And a'ter twelve o'clock had come
I felt a kinder faggin',
And laid myself un'neath a plum
To let my dinner settle sum,
When 'long come Jones's waggin,
And Jones was settin' in it, SO:
A-readin' of a paper.
His mules was goin' powerful slow,
Fur he had tied the lines onto
The staple of the scraper.
The mules they stopped about a rod
From me, and went to feedin'
'Longside the road, upon the sod,
But Jones (which he had tuck a tod)
Not knowin', kept a-readin'.
And presently says he: "Hit's true;
That Clisby's head is level.
Thar's one thing farmers all must do,
To keep themselves from goin' tew
Bankruptcy and the devil!
"More corn! more corn! MUST plant less ground,
And MUSTN'T eat what's boughten!
Next year they'll do it: reasonin's sound:
(And, cotton will fetch 'bout a dollar a pound),
THARFORE, I'LL plant ALL cotton!"
|