Edgar Lee Masters (Эдгар Ли Мастерс)
Shack Dye
The white men played all sorts of jokes on me. They took big fish off my hook And put little ones on, while I was away Getting a stringer, and made me believe I hadn’t seen aright the fish I had caught. When Burr Robbins circus came to town They got the ring master to let a tame leopard Into the ring, and made me believe I was whipping a wild beast like Samson When I, for an offer of fifty dollars, Dragged him out to his cage. One time I entered my blacksmith shop And shook as I saw some horse-shoes crawling Across the floor, as if alive -- Walter Simmons had put a magnet Under the barrel of water. Yet everyone of you, you white men, Was fooled about fish and about leopards too, And you didn’t know any more than the horse-shoes did.
Edgar Lee Masters’s other poems:
885
