Sprang a vengeance of Slav miners, Italians, Scots, Cornishmen, Yanks

Killings ran under the spoken commands of this boy

With eighty men and rifles on a hogback mountain.

They killed swearing to remember

The shot and charred wives and children

In the burnt camp of Ludlow,

And Louis Tikas, the laughing Greek,

Plugged with a bullet, clubbed with a gun butt.

As a home war

It held the nation a week

And one or two million men stood together

And swore by the retribution of steel.

It was all accidental.

He lived flecking lint off coat lapels

Of men he talked with.

He kissed the miners’ babies

And wrote a Denver paper

Of picket silhouettes on a mountain line.

He had no mother but Mother Jones

Crying from a jail window of Trinidad:

“All I want is room enough to stand

And shake my fist at the enemies of the human race.”

Named by a grand jury as a murderer

He went to Chihuahua, forgot his old Scotch name,

Smoked cheroots with Pancho Villa

And wrote letters of Villa as a rock of the people.

How can I tell how Don MacGregor went?

Three riders emptied lead into him.

He lay on the main street of an inland town.

A boy sat near all day throwing stones

To keep pigs away.

The Villa men buried him in a pit

With twenty Carranzistas.

There is drama in that point.

. . . the boy and the pigs.

Griffith would make a movie of it to fetch sobs.

Victor Herbert would have the drums whirr

In a weave with a high fiddle-string’s single clamor.

“And the muchacho sat there all day throwing stones

To keep the pigs away,” wrote Gibbons to the Tribune.

Somewhere in Chihuahua or Colorado

Is a leather bag of poems and short stories.

Napoleon

The little boy blew bubbles

Floating the air to glisten and shine

With a rainbow joy and airiness silken:

They floated and broke and were gone.

The man blew bubbles,

Made nations and kings and captains

And armies that marched and slaughtered

And laughed at the blood on their hands—

But the armies and kings and captains

Are broken and vanished and gone.

Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne lived under an arch of glooms.

Invisible scarves of undertaker’s crepe

Twisted at his throat to fasten on him

And he fought forever lifelong

The winds whipping to fasten these scarves.

Between two ears under a bone dome: caverns,

Or if we so choose: dank tarns:

And here he swam forever lifelong

Round and round in the destiny of a brass bowl

Lined with an inner dark of sea-green tarnish.

The wind whipping those scarves, of course,

Is another metaphor.

Mr. Blake’s Chariots

Mr. Blake saw invisible chariots on the sky

driven by unseen charioteers.

Himself he saw as a slim wisp of an ashen

mortality

And nevertheless took himself for a charioteer

riding high, grand and lonely.

Evidence As to a She Devil

Socrates had a fool woman.