The People, Yes

Tell him to be alone often and get at himself

and above all tell himself no lies about himself.

. . .

Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong

and the final decisions are made in silent rooms.

. . .

He will be lonely enough

to have time for the work

he knows as his own.

(Incomplete: qtd from my life)

The people yes

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 prison 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?"

... Money is power: so said one.

Money is a cushion: so said another

Money is the root of evil: so said still another

Money means freedom: so runs an old saying.

And money is all of these- and more.

Money pays for whatever you - want if

you have the money.

Money buys food, clothes, houses, land,

Guns, jewels, men, women, time to be lazy and

listen to music.

Money buys everything except love,

personality, freedom, immortality,

silence, peace