Social commentaries

The bugle sounds the measured call to prayers,
The band starts bravely with a clarion hymn,
From every side, singly, in groups, in pairs,
Each to his kind of service comes to worship Him.

The gates clanged and they walked you into jail
More tense than felons but relieved to find
The hostile world shut out, the flags that dripped
From every mother’ s windowpane, obscene
The bloodlust sweating from the public heart,
The dog authority slavering at your throat.
A sense of quiet, of pulling down the blind
Possessed you. Punishment you felt was clean.

It stops the town we come through. Workers raise
Their oily arms in good salute and grin.
Kids scream as at a circus. Business men
Glance hopefully and go their measured way.
And women standing at their dumbstruck door
More slowly wave and seem to warn us back,
As if a tear blinding the course of war
Might once dissolve our iron in their sweet wish.

with Dana Ward

Someone said you were dead
it’ s not that I didn’ t care
You were not bacterial
You were not frozen water in winter
You were not a hairbrush broken by hair
You were a treasure of gold in the world-toilet
For you appraised the world of grains
And flung the earth to the earth
The good wine is mixed with the bad wine,
come to the wine jar’ s lips and let’ s unmix it
Poor people only have one soul
but you and I have two
let’ s go on vacation to Mexico or Rome
Everybody returns home

The heart dies without space for love, without a moral horizon:
think of it then as a bird trapped in a box.
My heart goes out with love to those beyond the fence;
only toward them can one really advance, that is, make progress.
Without them I feel I’ m half a person.
Romeo was born a Montague, and Juliet came from the Capulet line,
and I’ m a disciple of Shakespeare, not Ben Gurion —
therefore I’ ll be delighted if my daughter marries the grandson of Haidar Abdel Shafi.

There is a wall of which the stones
Are lies and bribes and dead men's bones.
And wrongfully this evil wall
Denies what all men made for all,
And shamelessly this wall surrounds
Our homesteads and our native grounds.

Oh mighty City of New York! you are wonderful to behold,
Your buildings are magnificent, the truth be it told,
They were the only thing that seemed to arrest my eye,
Because many of them are thirteen storeys high.

And as for Central Park, it is lovely to be seen,
Especially in the summer season when its shrubberies and trees are green;
And the Burns’ statue is there to be seen,
Surrounded by trees, on the beautiful sward so green;
Also Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott,
Which by Englishmen and Scotchmen will ne’ er be forgot.

1. WALDORF-ASTORIA EUPHORIA,
THE JOY OF BIG CITIES

Joy, when intense, leads to various purposeless
movements — to dancing about, clapping the
hands, stamping, etc. — IBID.

A bird flew out at the break of day
From the nest where it had curled,
And ere the eve the bird had set
Fear on the kings of the world.

The first tree it lit upon
Was green with leaves unshed;
The second tree it lit upon
Was red with apples red;