Additional Poems By Joseph Freeman Essay Research

Extra Poems By Joseph Freeman Essay, Research Paper

TO THE OLD WORLD

If your sires have been wise and brave,

And illume a thousand visible radiations, it small affairs:

You are an elderly male monarch before his grave

Whom his ain foolishness has reduced to rags.

While the universe tumbles down approximately your caput,

Your royal cloak, inherited of old,

Faux pass from your shoulders by a broken yarn,

And gathers dust into its woven gold.

There allow it lie, entangled in itself.

Write the last footer to your history,

And, puting the volume on Time & # 8217 ; s press shelf,

Sit back to chew over on yearss that are to be,

When express joying male childs, turning to sober work forces,

Shall construct your ruins into a universe once more.

( 1921 )

PRINCE JERNIKIDZE

Prince Jernikidze wears his boots

Above his articulatio genuss ; his black moustache

Coils like the Kaiser & # 8217 ; s ; when he shoots

Friend and foe bend white as ash.

The motions of his custodies are svelt,

Ivory slugs grace his thorax,

The studded poignard at his belt

Dangles down his thigh. The best

Dancers in Tiflis envy his

Light Lesginka & # 8217 ; s steady commotion,

He bends his close-cropped caput to snog

The finger-tips of every miss.

Over the shashleek and the vino

His deep and passionate barytone

Directs the singing down the line,

And none may run out his glass entirely.

When forenoon interruptions into his room

He dons his long Circassian coat,

Marches to the Sovnarkom

Knocks at the door and clears his pharynx,

Opens the leger with his manus,

Bows to the commissars who pass,

Calls the janitor companion, and

Keeps histories for the on the job category.

( 1926 )

BALLAD OF TAMPA

When after dinner you smoke, gentlemen, retrieve

Tampa leads the universe doing clear Havanas: Mexicans,

Cubans, Urugayans, Porto Ricans are your lieges ;

Ybor City, Palmetto Beach, West Tampa perspiration, aching, starve,

For the cerulean smoke-ring exciting tonight & # 8217 ; s new ballad.

Dull-eyed sickly aged adult females stand confuted

In the factory-tomb stria, wrapper, pugilism.

Machines monotonously clock the proceedingss ;

Gossamer of cellophane automatically embraces cigars.

No, says the woman-worker, I don & # 8217 ; t count cigars packing ;

There & # 8217 ; s no clip, no clip ; we get used to it ;

One expression tells us how many there are ;

No clip. . . no clip. . . no clip.

Bastard houses, colonial and Spanish, thin

Over Ybor City & # 8217 ; s narrow Seventh Avenue, commemoration

Of antithetic races fluxing to the New World & # 8217 ; s shores.

Here the place of Tampa & # 8217 ; s proletariat winds its lank

Streets under balconies. Labor yokes all races ; voices

And sunshades cry Martinez, Cohen, Carducci! But O

Beloved flaring faces of Latin America, passionate

And austere, whose eyes burn with recollection

Of a 100 conflicts with the universe broad enemy.

Traveling place, gentlemen, we find no architecture ;

Home is an old broken wooden box patched

With Sn or paper, naked within, possibly a difficult fingerstall ;

Possibly, O petit-bourgeois luxury, even two ; possibly

A decrepit refrigerator, a tabular array gimping on three legs ;

Hovels whose faces grow black with concern.

Where will the rent & # 8211 ; two vaulting horses a hebdomad & # 8212 ; come from?

The workers, holding forgotten under the chronic

Fake smiling of the Blue Eagle the feel of labour,

Do non remember the names of conquistadors

Who foremost touched Tampa & # 8217 ; s shores ; allow the Chamber

Cornet to a descendants of tourers the memory

Of Pamfilo de Narvaez, Hernando de Soto

The huge dentition and eyeglassess of Teddy.

We know merely the 3rd democracy, the Roosevelt

Who flashes trecherous promises through a cataleptic addition.

We remember, gentlemen, the

great work stoppage of Thirty-One

When we marched to the mill of Sanchez y Haya

And on the H2O armored combat vehicle high above Ybor City

Nailed the ruddy flag with cock and reaping hook.

We remember, excessively, the panic, the bulls who wrecked

The face of our leader Hy Gordon, cracked their handguns

Through his wrist-bone broke our Union.

Let us travel, so Comrades, to the Communist meeting ;

Go in silence ; the disregarded adult male is forgotten,

he Reds remembered ; they are here illegal,

Meeting in secret in private places.

Tiptoe up the staircase one by one.

Order, compa? Eross ; Comrade Lopez has the floor.

The panic grows, we have no work, we starve ;

Our married womans and kids hungriness ; those who still

Labor aridly in the mills ( robbed

Of the traditional readers ) face new wage-cuts ;

The cops depredation meetings ; gaol, round, deport

The bravest, wisest workers, those

Who know the route to freedom from this snake pit.

The mill Gatess are closed to Negroes: & # 8211 ;

Let the black assholes dice, allow them all dice,

Let the blest Blue Eagle dedevour these rebellious worms,

But allow it continue our net incomes!

Compa? Eross, we shall non decease ; our ranks are but

A platoon in that huge ground forces, throughout

The universe which carries high the proletarian streamer

Contending through blood and panic toward the end.

We who one time raised the ruddy streamer over Ybor City

Shall make our portion so, striking the needed blows

For an America of work and idea for all.

Where dirt, mill and machine ; art,

Doctrine and scientific discipline ; love itself

Shall be with bread the part of the people.

Mankind looks frontward, but the injury expression back:

Broken of will, distracted and afraid,

They who have had no childhood but the rack

Shall yet be judged for what they & # 8217 ; ve done or said.

And if their pess, one time crucified, now drag,

We & # 8217 ; ll nail them one time once more upon our contempt:

When world Marches, allow the weak non slowdown,

Cursing the clip and topographic point where they were born.

The past dies, save for those whom it has broken ;

They will retrieve whom the universe has maimed.

Let them be soundless! Thingss must non be spoken

Which hide deep in the idea of adult male, ashamed:

Or, if their lips are acrimonious and inflamed,

Let them talk all by symbol and by item.

New York

1925

In this black room, midnight and forenoons are each

Aeons off ; the unfastened window brings

The sea & # 8217 ; s repetitive boom against the beach ;

Loud in the dark the hollow bellbuoy cracks

Skyward its melancholy drones ;

Above the blare of the breakage moving ridges

Far off its alone applauder groans

Like some despairing imbecile who raves

Crawling on custodies and articulatio genuss through empty streets

To doors that seem familiar, there to cry.

While one unconscious twisted metacarpophalangeal joint beats

For relief, for compassion and for slumber,

He rends the silence with a concluding call

To which the stubborn dark makes no answer.

New York

November 1931

The hosts that conflict for the universe & # 8217 ; s domain

Sweat impatiently within each cantonment ;

Once more the bloodsoaked Earth booms with the hobo

Of ground forcess thundering across the field.

And now once more the long ageless rain

Shall membranophone in darkness lights-outs upon the moistness

Chapped organic structures, or the xanthous lonely lamp

Of dark freshness on the visceras of the slain.

And we who one time awoke from the slow dream

Of peace and childhood to lay eyes on the sky

Broken asunder by the fire steel

Of shells whose decease came with a monstrous shriek,

Shall this clip, holding lived, cognize how to decease,

Rifle in manus, to do a merely dream existent.

New York

December 1931