The People, Yes (Excerpts)

26

You can drum on immense drums

the monotonous daily motions of the people

taking from earth and air

their morsels of bread and love,

a carryover from yesterday into tomorrow.

You can blow on great brass horns

the awful clamors of war and revolution

when swarming anonymous shadowshapes

obliterate old names Big Names

and cross out what was

and offer what is on a fresh blank page.

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The people, yes, the people,

Until the people are taken care of one way or another,

Until the people are solved somehow for the day and hour,

Until then one hears "Yes but the people what about the people?"

Sometimes as though the people is a child to be pleased or fed

Or again a hoodlum you have to be tough with

And seldom as though the people is a caldron and a reservoir

Of the human reserves that shape history,

The river of welcome wherein the broken First Families fade,

The great pool wherein wornout breeds and clans drop for restorative silence.

Fire, chaos, shadows,

Events trickling from a thin line of flame

On into cries and combustions never expected

The people have the element of surprise.

Where are the kings today?

What has become of their solid and fastened thrones?

Who are the temporary puppets holding sway while anything, "God only knows what," waits around a corner, sits in the shadows and holds an ax, waiting for the appointed hour?

"The czar has eight million men with guns and bayonets.

Nothing can happen to the czar.

The czar is the voice of God and shall live forever.

Turn and look at the forest of steel and cannon

Where the czar is guarded by eight million soldiers.

Nothing can happen to the czar."

They said that for years and in the summer of 1914

In the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Fourteen

As a portent and an assurance they said with owl faces:

"Nothing can happen to the czar."

Yet the czar and his bodyguard of eight million vanished

And the czar stood in a cellar before a little firing squad

And the command of fire was given

And the czar stepped into regions of mist and ice

The czar travelled into an ethereal uncharted siberia

While two kaisers also vanished from thrones

Ancient and established in blood and iron—

Two kaisers backed by ten million bayonets

Had their crowns in a gutter, their palaces mobbed.

In fire, chaos, shadows,

In hurricanes beyond foretelling of probabilities,

In the shove and whirl of unforeseen combustions

The people, yes, the people,

Move eternally in the elements of surprise,

Changing from hammer to bayonet and back to hammer,

The hallelujah chorus forever shifting its star soloists.

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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

twisting 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

shot on a gun-metal gloaming.

Man is a long time coming.

Man will yet win.

Brother may yet line up with brother:

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

There are men who can't be bought.

The fireborn are at home in fire.

The stars make no noise.

You can't hinder the wind from blowing.

Time is a great teacher.

Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief

the people march.

In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for

keeps, the people march:

"Where to? what next?"