To a lawyer who came saying he had undertaken more financial reorganizations than there was time for and his nerves were shot the doctor talked long about worry, gave the lawyer a box and 100 black beans: “Each morning you drop a bean in the box and say, ‘Worry is in the bean and the bean is in the box.’”

In the hoom hoom of the big steamboat docking the doctor said,

“Silence is the great gratitude when bad music ends.”

107

The people will live on.

The learning and blundering people will live on.

They will be tricked and sold and again sold

And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,

The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,

You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.

The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,

is a vast huddle with many units saying:

“I earn my living.

I make enough to get by

and it takes all my time.

If I had more time

I could do more for myself

and maybe for others.

I could read and study

and talk things over

and find out about things.

It takes time.

I wish I had the time.”

The people is a tragic and comic two-face:

hero and hoodlum: phantom and gorilla twist-

ing to moan with a gargoyle mouth: “They

buy me and sell me … it’s a game . . .

sometime I’ll break loose . . .”

Once having marched

Over the margins of animal necessity,

Over the grim line of sheer subsistence

Then man came

To the deeper rituals of his bones,

To the lights lighter than any bones,

To the time for thinking things over,

To the dance, the song, the story,

Or the hours given over to dreaming,

Once having so marched.

Between the finite limitations of the five senses

and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond

the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food

while reaching out when it comes their way

for lights beyond the prisms of the five senses,

for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.

This reaching is alive.

The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.

Yet this reaching is alive yet

for lights and keepsakes.

The people know the salt of the sea

and the strength of the winds

lashing the corners of the earth.

The people take the earth

as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.

Who else speaks for the Family of Man?

They are in tune and step

with constellations of universal law.

The people is a polychrome,

a spectrum and a prism

held in a moving monolith,

a console organ of changing themes,

a clavilux of color poems

wherein the sea offers fog

and the fog moves off in rain

and the labrador sunset shortens

to a nocturne of clear stars

serene over the shot spray

of northern lights.

The steel mill sky is alive.

The fire breaks white and zigzag