The Windy City 5

Forgive us if the monotonous houses go mile on mile
Along monotonous streets out to the prairies —
If the faces of the houses mumble hard words
At the streets — and the street voices only say:
"Dust and a bitter wind shall come."
Forgive us if the lumber porches and doorsteps
Snarl at each other —
And the brick chimneys cough in a close-up of
Each other's faces —
And the ramshackle stairways watch each other
As thieves watch —
And dooryard lilacs near a malleable iron works
Long ago languished
In a short whispering purple.

And if the alley ash cans
Tell the garbage-wagon drivers
The children play the alley is Heaven
And the streets of Heaven shine
With a grand dazzle of stones of gold
And there are no policemen in Heaven —
Let the rag-tags have it their way.

And if the geraniums
In the tin cans of the window sills
Ask questions not worth answering —
And if a boy and a girl hunt the sun
With a sieve for sifting smoke —
Let it pass — let the answer be —
"Dust and a bitter wind shall come."
Forgive us if the jazz timebeats
Of these clumsy mass shadows
Moan in saxophone undertones,
And the footsteps of the jungle,
The fang cry, the rip claw hiss,
The sneak-up and the still watch,
The slant of the slit eyes waiting —
If these bother respectable people
with the right crimp in their napkins
reading breakfast menu cards —
forgive us — let it pass — let be.

If cripples sit on their stumps
And joke with the newsies bawling,
"Many lives lost! many lives lost!
Ter-ri-ble ac-ci-dent! many lives lost!"—
If again twelve men let a woman go,
" He done me wrong; I shot him"—
Or the blood of a child's head
Spatters on the hub of a motor truck —
Or a 44-gat cracks and lets the skylights
Into one more bank messenger—
Or if boys steal coal in a railroad yard
And run with humped gunnysacks
While a bull picks off one of the kids
And the kid wriggles with an ear in cinders
And a mother comes to carry home
A bundle, a limp bundle,
To have his face washed, for the last time,
Forgive us if it happens — and happens again —
And happens again.

Forgive the jazz timebeat
of clumsy mass shadows,
footsteps of the jungle,
the fang cry, the rip claw hiss,
the slant of the slit eyes waiting.

Forgive us if we work so hard
And the muscles bunch clumsy on us
And we never know why we work so hard —
If the big houses with little families
And the little houses with big families
Sneer at each other's bars of misunderstanding;
Pity us when we shackle and kill each other
And believe at first we understand
And later say we wonder why.

Take home the monotonous patter
Of the elevated railroad guard in the rush hours:
"Watch your step. Watch your step. Watch your step."
Or write on a pocket pad what a pauper said
To a patch of purple asters at a whitewashed wall:
"Let every man be his own Jesus — that's enough."