Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work
in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.
The shop windows snicker
flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:
you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough.
Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning
we dream of the stop on the subway without a name,
the door in the heart of the grove of skyscrapers,
that garden where we nestle to the teats of a furry world,
lie in mounds of peony eating grapes,
and need barter ourselves for nothing.
not by the hour, not by the pound, not by the skinful,
that party to which no one will give or sell us the key
though we have all thought briefly we found it
drunk or in bed.
Black girls with thin legs and high necks stalking like herons,
plump girls with blue legs and green eyelids and
strawberry breasts,
swept off to be frozen in fluorescent cubes,
the vacuum of your jobs sucks your brains dry
and fills you with the ooze of melted comics.
Living is later. This is your rented death.
You grasp at hard commodities and vague lusts
to make up, to pay for each day
which opens like a can and is empty, and then another,
afternoons like dinosaur eggs stuffed with glue.
Girls of the dirty morning, ticketed and spent,
you will be less at forty than at twenty.
Your living is a waste product of somebody’s mill.
I would fix you like buds to a city where people work
to make and do things necessary and good,
where work is real as bread and babies and trees in parks
where we would all blossom slowly and ripen to sound fruit.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Alone by Sara Teasdale
- Ольга Берггольц – Осень (Мне осень озёрного края)
- Олег Бундур – В зоологическом музее
- Владимир Набоков – Какое сделал я дурное дело
- Sonnet XI. On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer poem – John Keats poems
- Владимир Высоцкий – В плен, приказ, не сдаваться
- Death Sir Henry Wootton
- Like Barley Bending by Sara Teasdale
- Константин Бальмонт – Народные поверья
- Olney Hymn 45: The Happy Change by William Cowper
- As Slow Our Ship by Thomas Moore
- Sweetheart by M. T. Metutera
- Ballade Of The Dead Cities poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Basic Overhaul by Nijole Miliauskaite
- Trees poem – Angelina Weld Grimke poems | Poems and Poetry
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).