the atom and isolate its electrons and

make it tell why it is what it is?

Believers and hopers.

Let the work of their fathers and elder

brothers be cancelled this instant and

what would happen?

Nothing—only every tool, bus, car, light,

torch, bulb, print, film, instrument or

communication depending for its life

on electrodynamic power would stop

and stand dumb and silent.

37

“So you want to divide all the money there is

and give every man his share?”

“That’s it. Put it all in one big pile and split

it even for everybody.”

“And the land, the gold, silver, oil, copper, you want

that divided up?”

“Sure—an even whack for all of us”

“Do you mean that to go for horses and cows?”

“Sure—why not?”

“And how about pigs?”

“Oh to hell with you—you know I got a couple of pigs.”

In the night and the mist these voices:

What is mine is mine and I am going to keep it.

What is yours is yours and you are welcome to keep it.

You will have to fight me to take from me what is mine.

Part of what is mine is yours and you are welcome to it.

What is yours is mine and I am going to take it from you.

In the night and the mist

the voices meet

as the clash of steel on steel

Over the rights of possession and control and the points:

what is mine? what is yours?

and who says so?

The poor were divided into

the deserving and the undeserving

and a pioneer San Franciscan lacked words:

“It’s hard enough to be poor

but to be poor and undeserving . . .”

He saw the slumborn illborn wearyborn

from fathers and mothers the same

out of rooms dank with rot

and scabs, rags, festerings, tubercles, chancres,

the very doorways quavering,

“What’s the use?”

“I came to a country,”

said a wind-bitten vagabond,

“where I saw shoemakers barefoot

saying they had made too many shoes.

I met carpenters living outdoors

saying they had built too many houses.

Clothing workers I talked with,

bushelmen and armhole-basters,

said their coats were on a ragged edge

because they had made too many coats.

And I talked with farmers, yeomanry,

the backbone of the country,

so they were told,

saying they were in debt and near starvation

because they had gone ahead like always

and raised too much wheat and corn

too many hogs, sheep, cattle.

When I said, ‘You live in a strange country,’

they answered slow, like men

who wouldn’t waste anything, not even language:

‘You ain’t far wrong there, young feller.

We’re going to do something, we don’t know what.’”

The drowning man in the river

answered the man on the bridge:

“I don’t want to die,

I’ll lose my job in the molding room of

the Malleable Iron and Castings Works.”

And the living man on the bridge

hotfooted to the molding room foreman

of the Malleable Iron and Castings Works