I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.

The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.

A Reporter in Debt

The poet who kept himself in debt

knowing the big stream of people

live with their feet and shoulders

clambering through pits of debt,

the poet spoke easy:

“why should I be free who must write chains?

how shall I write chains unless the steel

clutches my wrists and ankles?

unless I am dirty and dusty from the pits

how can I write the people of the pits?”

My People

My people are gray,

pigeon gray, dawn gray, storm gray.

I call them beautiful,

and I wonder where they are going.

Poems Done on a Late Night Car

I. CHICKENS

I am The Great White Way of the city:

When you ask what is my desire, I answer:

“Girls fresh as country wild flowers,

With young faces tired of the cows and barns,

Eager in their eyes as the dawn to find my mysteries,

Slender supple girls with shapely legs,

Lure in the arch of their little shoulders

And wisdom from the prairies to cry only softly at the ashes of my mysteries.”

II. USED UP

Lines based on certain regrets that come with rumination upon the painted faces of women on North Clark Street Chicago

Roses,

Red roses,

Crushed

In the rain and wind

Like mouths of women

Beaten by the fists of

Men using them.

O little roses

And broken leaves

And petal wisps:

You that so flung your crimson

To the sun

Only yesterday.

III. HOME

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:

I heard it in the air of one night when I listened

To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness.

Prairie

I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.

Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.

Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.