Ask questions not worth answering—

And if a boy and a girl hunt the sun

With a sieve for sifting smoke—

Let it pass—let the answer be—

“Dust and a bitter wind shall come.”

Forgive us if the jazz timebeats

Of these clumsy mass shadows

Moan in saxophone undertones,

And the footsteps of the jungle,

The fang cry, the rip claw hiss,

The sneak-up and the still watch,

The slant of the slit eyes waiting—

If these bother respectable people

with the right crimp in their napkins

reading breakfast menu cards—

forgive us—let it pass—let be.

If cripples sit on their stumps

And joke with the newsies bawling,

“Many lives lost! many lives lost!

Ter-ri-ble ac-ci-dent! many lives lost!”—

If again twelve men let a woman go,

“He done me wrong; I shot him”—

Or the blood of a child’s head

Spatters on the hub of a motor truck—

Or a 44-gat cracks and lets the skylights

Into one more bank messenger—

Or if boys steal coal in a railroad yard

And run with humped gunnysacks

While a bull picks off one of the kids

And the kid wriggles with an ear in cinders

And a mother comes to carry home

A bundle, a limp bundle,

To have his face washed, for the last time,

Forgive us if it happens—and happens again—

And happens again.

Forgive the jazz timebeat

of clumsy mass shadows,

footsteps of the jungle,

the fang cry, the rip claw hiss,

the slant of the slit eyes waiting.

Forgive us if we work so hard

And the muscles bunch clumsy on us

And we never know why we work so hard—

If the big houses with little families

And the little houses with big families

Sneer at each other’s bars of misunderstanding;

Pity us when we shackle and kill each other

And believe at first we understand

And later say we wonder why.

Take home the monotonous patter

Of the elevated railroad guard in the rush hours:

“Watch your step. Watch your step. Watch your step.”

Or write on a pocket pad what a pauper said

To a patch of purple asters at a whitewashed wall:

“Let every man be his own Jesus—that’s enough.”

6

The wheelbarrows grin, the shovels and the mortar

hoist an exploit.

The stone shanks of the Monadnock, the Transportation,

the People’s Gas Building, stand up and scrape

at the sky.

The wheelbarrows sing, the bevels and the blueprints

whisper.

The library building named after Crerar, naked

as a stock farm silo, light as a single eagle

feather, stripped like an airplane propeller,

takes a path up.

Two cool new rivets say, “Maybe it is morning,”

“God knows.”

Put the city up; tear the city down;

put it up again; let us find a city.

Let us remember the little violet-eyed

man who gave all, praying, “Dig and

dream, dream and hammer, till your

city comes.”

Every day the people sleep and the city dies;

every day the people shake loose, awake and