Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 179

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I walked out on the lamp shadowed concrete at midnight May Day passing a dark’d barfront,

police found corpses under the floor last year, call-girls & Cadillacs lurked there on First Avenue

around the block from my apartment, I’d come downstairs for tonight’s newspapers—

refrigerator repair shop’s window grate padlocked, fluorescent blue

light on a pile of newspapers, pages shifting in the chill Spring wind

’round battered cans & plastic refuse bags leaned together at the pavement edge—

Wind wind and old news sailed thru the air, old Times whirled above the garbage.

At the Corner of 11th under dim Street-light in a hole in the ground

a man wrapped in work-Cloth and wool Cap pulled down his bullet skull

stood & bent with a rod & flashlight turning round in his pit halfway sunk in earth

Peering down at his feet, up to his chest in the asphalt by a granite Curb

where his work mate poked a flexible tube in a tiny hole, a youth in gloves

who answered my question “Smell of gas—Someone must’ve reported in”—

Yes the body stink of City bowels, rotting tubes six feet under

Could explode any minute sparked by Con Ed’s breathing Puttering truck

I noticed parked, as I passed by hurriedly Thinking Ancient Rome, Ur

Were they like this, the same shadowy surveyors & passers-by

scribing records of decaying pipes & Garbage piles on Marble, Cuneiform,

ordinary midnight citizen out on the street looking for Empire News,

rumor, gossip, workmen police in uniform, walking silent sunk in thought

under windows of sleepers coupled with Monster squids & Other-Planet eyeballs in their sheets

in the same night six thousand years old where Cities rise & fall & turn to dream?

May 1, 1978, 6 A.M.

ADAPTED FROM Neruda’s

“Que dispierte el lenador”

V

Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Let Lincoln come with his ax

and with his wooden plate

to eat with the farmworkers.

May his craggy head,

his eyes we see in constellations,

in the wrinkles of the live oak,

come back to look at the world

rising up over the foliage

higher than Sequoias.

Let him go shop in pharmacies,

let him take the bus to Tampa

let him nibble a yellow apple,

let him go to the movies, and

talk to everybody there.

Let the Railsplitter awake!

Let Abraham come back, let his old yeast

rise in green and gold earth of Illinois,

and lift the ax in his city

against the new slavemakers

against their slave whips

against the venom of the print houses

against all the bloodsoaked

merchandise they want to sell.

Let the young white boy and young black

march singing and smiling

against walls of gold,

against manufacturers of hatred,

against the seller of his own blood,

singing, smiling and winning at last.

Let the Railsplitter awake!

VI

Peace for all twilights to come,

peace for the bridge, peace for the wine,

peace for the letters that look for me

and pump in my blood tangled

with earth and love’s old chant,

peace for the city in the morning

when bread wakes up,

peace for Mississippi, the river of roots,

peace for my brother’s shirt,

peace in the book like an airmail stamp,

peace for the great Kolkhoz of Kiev,

peace for the ashes of these dead

and those other dead, peace for the black

iron of Brooklyn, peace for the lettercarrier

going from house to house like the day,

peace for the choreographer shrieking

thru a funnel of honeysuckle vines,

peace to my right hand

that only wants to write Rosario,

peace for the Bolivian, secret as a lump of tin,

peace for you to get married, peace

for all the sawmills of Bio-Bio,

peace to Revolutionary Spain’s torn heart

peace to the little museum of Wyoming

in which the sweetest thing

was a pillowcase embroidered with a heart,

peace to the baker and his loaves,

and peace to all the flour: peace

for all the wheat still to be born,

peace for all the love that wants to flower,

peace for all those who live: peace

to all the lands and waters.

And here I say farewell, I return

to my house, in my dreams

I go back to Patagonia where

the wind beats at barns

and the Ocean spits ice.

I’m nothing more than a poet:

I want love for you all,

I go wander the world I love:

in my country they jail the miners

and soldiers give orders to judges.

But down to its very roots

I love my little cold country.

If I had to die a thousand times

that’s where I’d want to die:

if I had to be born a thousand times

that’s where I’d want to be born,

near the Araucanian wilds’

sea-whirled south winds,

bells just brought from the bellmaker.

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