Working Girls

The working girls in the morning are going to work — long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.

Each morning as I move through this river of young-woman life I feel a wonder about where it is all going, so many with a peach bloom of young years on them and laughter of red lips and memories in their eyes of dances the night before and plays and walks.

Green and gray streams run side by side in a river and so here are always the others, those who have been over the way, the women who know each one the end of life’s gamble for her, the meaning and the clue, the how and the why of the dances and the arms that passed around their waists and the fingers that played in their hair.

Faces go by written over: “I know it all, I know where the bloom and the laughter go and I have memories,” and the feet of these move slower and they have wisdom where the others have beauty.

So the green and the gray move in the early morning on the downtown streets.

— Carl Sandburg

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

— Philip Larkin

There is no frigate like a book
to take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
of prancing poetry.

This traverse may the poorest take
without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
that bears a human soul.

— Emily Dickenson

mr youse needn’t be so spry
concernin questions arty

each has his tastes but as for i
i likes a certain party

gimme the he-man’s solid bliss
for youse ideas i’ll match youse

a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues

— e. e. cummings

ALL THIS TIME

The teachers told us the Romans built this place,
they built a wall and a temple, an edge of the empire garrison town.
They lived and they died, they prayed to their gods
but the stone gods did not make a sound
and their empire crumbled ’til all that was left
was the stones the workmen found.

— Gordon Sumner (performing as “Sting”)

Eddie the spaghetti nut
courted pretty Nettie Cutt.
They wed and Ed and Nettie got
a cottage in Connecticut.

Eddie said to Nettie, “Hot
spaghetti I’ve just got to get.”
So Nettie put it in a pot
and cooked spaghetti hot and wet.

Nettie cut spaghetti up
for Eddie in Connecticut.
Eddie slurped it from a cup,
that hot spaghetti Nettie cut.

Then Eddie, Nettie and their cat
that Nettie called Spaghettipet
all sat in the spaghetti vat —
so much for their spaghettiquette.

— Jack Prelutsky

Dilly-Dally Song

Pumpernickel pickle
Pumpernickel bread
give me just a little
before I climb in bed

a little jam or jelly
a glass of cider slue
a little lizard belly
an orangu-kangaroo

an appaloosa goosa
a slice from outer space
a moosa on the loosa
(and make it open face)

a koala I can swalla
a cup of llama creame
fill me up, warm love, tonite
and feed me pretzel dreams

— Denise Panek