"bareheaded" poems
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman **** and go free to
**** again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
2.2k
Umbrellas, umbrellas, holding off the rain.
Sheltering all from the sky’s falling tears.
A common bareheaded woman with a basket,
Becomes the object of one man's inquiring gaze.
What protects her from his illicit intentions?
His wealth from exploiting her poverty?
She possesses no umbrella against the rain.
No shield against his shower of false affections.
And oblivious; a little girl with toy hoop looks on.
A questioning sadness in her dark, innocent, eyes.
Unconcerned curiosity, observing the world’s corruption.
And yet, and yet: unaware of her own, future vulnerability.
© Paul Chafer 2014
Feb 17, 2014
Feb 17, 2014 at 9:50 AM UTC
For the gladness here where the sun is shining at
evening on the weeds at the river,
Our prayer of thanks.
For the laughter of children who tumble barefooted and
bareheaded in the summer grass,
Our prayer of thanks.
For the sunset and the stars, the women and the white
arms that hold us,
Our prayer of thanks.
God,
If you are deaf and blind, if this is all lost to you,
God, if the dead in their coffins amid the silver handles
on the edge of town, or the reckless dead of war
days thrown unknown in pits, if these dead are
forever deaf and blind and lost,
Our prayer of thanks.
God,
The game is all your way, the secrets and the signals and
the system; and so for the break of the game and
the first play and the last.
Our prayer of thanks.
1.2k
I can laugh now,
but for a time
I was so scared
of my shadow;
that I would only
venture forth at
night, or noon
or during an
occasional
eclipse of the sun.
You might guess
that I’d be ridiculed,
what with carrying
a parasol to school
on sunny days in spring,
but my brother was
three hundred pounds
of muscle, hung out
with the Amboy Dukes
and carried, as a
weapon, half a tree
trunk like a third arm.
From the time I was
six years old, the other
children called me sir.
My mother put an end
to it “toot sweet.”
While no student
of psychology,
she took the time to
reason with me,
as she bent over a
steaming laundry tub,
in her ragged house dress,
like something out of Dickens.
She said quite clearly,
“Go outside right now,
or I will ******* you.”
My mother never hit,
but I took my sneakered
feet down the tenement
stairs, so quickly that they
barely touched the steps,
and then bareheaded,
I braved the April sun.
May 17, 2016
May 17, 2016 at 7:59 PM UTC