SOMEBODY AND SOMEBODY
ELSE
AND
YOU
Brother, consider as you go your way,
hemmed in by houses or flanked by fields,
conjunctions of roads through midland plains
of grain, watching dried cornstalks sway
dead and cracking in the wind's running:
who spews pennies on the streets of cities?
who jams the faucet, holds rain from crops?
and who reverses this?
They've got a big paunch planted in a soil
rich with minerals of the U. S. Treasury,
kept moist continually with oil (and explosions
and many charred bones on the grass keep the earth
fecund) kept living in a protracted birth
forecasting strangulation.
They who have reaped your harvest
offer you the stalks. They
have teeth and fangs but their breasts
are dry, sucked empty. They have seen
millions of you stretching skeletal
hands toward them. They have ·been
deaf to everything you've had to say.
But you go your way, brother. They will 'go theirs.
By the time you meet you will have gathered
mass enough to challenge their right of way.
Maybe there won't be any doughnuts and coffee,
maybe you'll go a long way before you find
a house to shelter you, a bed to sleep in nights
and somebody to lie with, closely, and feel
here at last you've a moment for breathing
easily, peacefully, without hurry.
But when have you had a house
for nightrest and a place
to sleep in without rats
9
