and got a short answer:

“You’re ten minutes late. The man who

pushed that fellow off the bridge

is already on the job.”

“What do you want?” a passing stranger asked

a County Kerry farmer.

“What is it I’m wantin’? Me byes and girruls

is gone. The rain has rotted the prathies.

The landlord has taken me pig for the rint.

All I’m wantin’ is the Judgment Day.”

“The poor of the earth hide themselves together,” wrote Job meaning in those days too they had a shantytown.

“As wild asses in the wilderness they must go forth, to seek food as their task,” wrote Job meaning then too they carried the banner and hoped to connect with board and clothes somehow.

“In a field not theirs they harvest,” wrote Job as though in Judea then the frontier was gone, as now in America instead of free homesteads the signs say: No Trespassing.

“The weaklings groan and the souls of the wounded cry for help,” wrote Job taking special notice of those “forced to garner the vineyard of the wicked one,” mentioning footless wanderers of Bible times as though the devices of men then too had an edge against the propertyless.

In the Sunflower State 1928 Anno Domini

a Jayhawker sunburnt and gaunt

drove to a loading platform

and took what he got for his hogs

and spoke before two other hog raisers:

“Everything’s lopsided.

“I raise hogs and the railroads and the banks take them away from me and I get hit in the hind end.

“The more hogs I raise the worse my mortgages look.

“I try to sleep and I hear those mortgages gnawing in the night like rats in a com crib.

“I want to shoot somebody but I don’t know who.

“We’ll do something. You wait and see.

“We don’t have to stand for this skin game if we’re free Americans.”

“Get off this estate.”

“What for?”

“Because it’s mine.”

“Where did you get it?”

“From my father.”

“Where did he get it?”

“From his father.”

“And where did he get it?”

“He fought for it.”

“Well, I’ll fight you for it.”

58

The people, yes,

Out of what is their change

from chaos to order

and chaos again?

“Yours till the hangman doth us part,”

Don Magregor ended his letters.

“It annoys me to die,”

said a philosopher.

“I should like to see what follows.”

To those who had ordered them to death,

one of them said:

“We die because the people are asleep

and you will die because the people will awaken.”

Greek met Greek when Phocion and Democritus spoke.

“You will drive the Athenians mad some day and they will kill you.”

“Yes, me when they go mad, and as sure as they get sane again, you.”

78

What did Hiamovi, the red man, Chief of

the Cheyennes, have?

To a great chief at Washington and to a

chief of peoples across the waters,

Hiamovi spoke:

“There are birds of many colors—red, blue,