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| THE RIVETED rafters drip the rain and the twilight pave is puddle and mud, | |
| But the peddlers’ carts are huddled again and the crowd jams past in a woollen flood— | |
| They weave a pattern of reds and blacks, women in shawls and men in coats, | |
| Women who trudge with broken backs and wisps of men with bearded throats. | |
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| From jets cart-held the wind-tossed gas flames a shadowy fire that traces | 5 |
| Poverty’s stamp on the forms that pass, misery’s blight on the world-old faces— | |
| Pain, that sculptor of men, has creased many a line in many a brow, | |
| Till he, with love divine, released a splendour which is shining now. | |
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| For under the greys and the saffrons daubed on the ancient faces, life looks through, | |
| Every atom of soil absorbed in the human stir and the struggle new— | 10 |
| These as by red-hot rivets are clutched to the nerve-live business thrilling the hour— | |
| Here where the strings of the purse are touched the brain becomes a working power. | |
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| Where have I mixed in this scene before? In what strange world, in what strange age? | |
| Lo, in the flesh of life’s uproar these people float from a printed page, | |
| Rises Isaiah, Rizpah, Ruth, prophet, and woman-in-love, and mother, | 15 |
| See where Isaiah is visioning Truth as he peddles fish to Abel’s brother. | |
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| Worlds away and worlds behind all living worlds these souls assemble, | |
| Rizpah there with her dead to mind, Ruth with her yearning heart a-tremble! | |
| What to these are Wall Street’s currents of electricity circling Earth? | |
| What to these are Broadway’s torrents of roaring work and rippling mirth? | 20 |
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| By what nerve do these souls connect with the huge skyscraping towers of steel | |
| That girdle Earth with their intellect, a might that world-end millions feel? | |
| What place have these in the world we sense and glimpse in the morning paper’s print? | |
| Lost, they are lost in a world immense, and who is aware of their strife and stint? | |
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| And yet America’s mightiest age shall be child of these wonderful mothers of men— | 25 |
| Each in her realm is queen and sage, and shall remake the world again— | |
| Her babes are the masters of dim To-morrows, her daughters the wives and teachers to come, | |
| Out of her woes and her infinite sorrows she breeds the Lincolns of the Slum. | |
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| Out of the simple and common clay, out of the very earth of Earth, | |
| Now, as ever, there break away spirits that feed the world’s great dearth— | 30 |
| Take the startling gas-fire glow, stand, stand still, let me see your face! | |
| Mother, that your strange heart might know you are the fount of a future race! | |
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