EASTLAND

The Eastland
Let's be honest now
For a couple of minutes
Even though we're in Chicago.

Since you ask me about it,
I let you have it straight;
My guts ain't ticklish about the Eastland.

It was a hell of a job, of course
To dump 2,500 people in their clean picnic clothes
All ready for a whole lot of real fun
Down into the dirty Chicago river without any warning.

Women and kids, wet hair and scared faces,
The coroner hauling truckloads of the dripping dead
To the Second Regiment armory where doctors waited
With useless pulmotors and the eight hundred motionless stiff
Lay ready for their relatives to pick them out on the floor
And take them home and call up the undertaker...

Well I was saying
My guts ain't ticklish about it.
I got imagination: I see a pile of three thousand dead people
Killed by the con, tuberculosis, too much work
                             and not enough fresh air and green groceries

A lot of cheap roughnecks and the women and children of wops,
    and hardly any bankers and corporation lawyers or their kids,
    die from the con-three thousand a year in Chicago and a
    hundred and fifty thousand a year in the United States-all
    from the con and not enough fresh air and green groceries...

If you want to see excitement, more noise and crying than you ever
    heard in one of these big disasters the newsboys clean up on,
Go and stack in a high pile all the babies that die in Christian
    Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Chicago in one year
    before aforesaid babies haven't had enough good milk;
On top of that pile put all the little early babies pulled from mothers
    willing to be torn with abortions rather than bring more
    children into the world-
Jesus, that would make a front page picture for the Sunday papers

And you could write under it:
Morning glories
Born from the soil of love,
Yet now perished.

Have you ever stood and watched the kids going to work of a
   morning?  White faces, skinny legs and arms, slouching along
   rubbing the sleep out of their eyes on the go to hold their jobs?

Can you imagine a procession of all the whores of a big town,
   marching and marching with painted faces and mocking struts,
   all the women who sleep in faded hotels and furnished rooms
   with any man coming along with a dollar or five dollars?

Or all the structual iron workers, railroad men and factory hands
   in mass formation with stubs of arms and stumps of legs, bodies
   broken and hacked while bosses yelled, "Speed-no slack-
   go to it!"?

Or two by two all the girls and women who go to the hind doors of
   restaurants and through the alleys and on the market street
   digging into the garbage barrels to get scraps of stuff to eat?

By the living Christ, these would make disaster pictures to paste on
   the front pages of the newspapers.

Yes, the Eastland was a dirty bloody job-bah!
                                 I see a dozen Eastlands
                                 Every morning on my way to work
                                 And a dozen more going home at night.

*** Con = Consumption

CHICAGO

        Hog Butcher for the World,
        Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat,
        Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
        Stormy, husky, brawling,
        City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen you
     painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: yes, it is true I have seen
     the gunman kill and go free to kill again
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women
     and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my
     city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be
     alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall
     bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted
     against the wilderness,
        Bareheaded,
        Shoveling,
        Wrecking,
        Planning,
        Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs
     the heart of the people,
             Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,
     sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
     Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

FOG

The fog comes
on little cat feet. 

It sits looking
over the harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on. 

COOL TOMBS

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs he forgot
   the copperheads and the assassin . . . in the dust, in the
   cool tombs.

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street,
   cash and collateral turned ashes . . . in the dust, in the
   cool tombs.

Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in
   November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she
   remember? . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs?

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries,
   cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin
   horns . . . tell me if the lovers are losers . . . tell me if any
   get more than the lovers . . . in the dust . . . in the cool
   tombs.

BLUE ISLAND INTERSECTION

Six Street ends come together here.
They feed people and wagons into the center.
In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags.
Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby
buggies.

Six ends of streets and no sleep for them all day.
The people and wagons come and go, out and in.
Triangles of banks and drug stores watch.
The policemen whistle, the trolley cars bump.
Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day.