Spring came on this morning
With blackbottom, Charleston, and tango steps:
Came not in venturings of pale green
Paging the stray informalities of breezes,
But leapt down the city block
With gaieties rehearsed, sophisticated,
So like a boy emerging from a night-club
And wearily remembering his youth.
John Miljus slaved in the hole
Where pain and sweat leave secret epitaphs
Upon the concrete and iron foundation
Of a building forty storeys high.
John Miljus swung his pick and shovel
Doggedly, like a creature
Chained to a dream of submission
And yet, rebelling against it.
The anger of a soul
Met the fumes of bootleg whiskey
In his breast and made a sickness
Whimpering too much to be sullen,
Fumbling too much to be hatred.
Oh, what did Spring mean to John Miljus
But people leaning over a railing
Fifty feet above him,
Watching him like vexing, idle blanks;
Straining of muscles in a game
Too commonplace to be an ordeal,
An old, old game where weak imaginations
Seek the heaving strength of arms and legs.
Afterwards five drinks of alcohol
Spreading their crude, tense sneer
To bring him visions of sportive power;
A girl, dumb, faintly teasing,
To chase away the cowering of his flesh;
An older woman lending him
Her sticky, well-used lips
To veil her itching for his pocketbook.
Oh, John Miljus, you are caught
Between cynical and over-hopeful men
Who gesture and argue while you chase
Will-o'-the-wisps of freedom, peace . . . .
John Miljus in his rubber boots
And overalls so like the color
And texture of lost expectation,
Slaved within the spring morning.
A steam-crane lifting an iron girder
Broke — the wanton missile
Made a joke of his body,
Dropped upon him and stopped
His life-breath in the shadow of a second,
Snapped his breast and head
And wrapped them in the tenderness of mud.
Men ran toward him, clustered around him.
Hundreds of faces no longer casual
Peered down from the railing fifty feet above.
Yes, John Miljus, you are important now.
Now they will sprinkle your body
With moistures wrung from sentimental fear,