Bruce Harris
Poor People's Houses - Wingate, 1959
To the sight and thought of a young boy’s mind
the houses were burning like Indian wars
with separate smoke stacks merging to form
a drifting grey canopy over the row.
The netties were lined up down from the terrace
imitating the houses; across concrete yards
some long johns flapped like semaphore swearing.
I imagined them weeping in their little houses
desperately damning life’s injustices;
but they were pale, proud, noisy people
with black-rimmed eyes and hard-edged smiles,
all wrapped in layers of dark, dull clothing
and given to secrets which they wore like badges.
I wondered then, as I still do now,
what curious numbers on tumbling dice
put them in the valley and me on the hill,
them in the grey smoke and me in the high air.
The emotional compass has points in profusion
with outrage, gratitude, smugness and pain,
anger, destiny, community, rebellion,
impaled like hearts on daggers; the only certainty
locked in the permanence of arbitrary justice.
Page(s) 75-76
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