What Is Found There

From the gun-boats in the river,
Ten-inch shells for Christmas gifts,
And peace on earth forever.

Merry Christmas, India,
To Gandhi in his cell,
From righteous Christian England,
Ring out, bright Christmas bell!

Ring Merry Christmas, Africa,
From Cairo to the Cape!
Ring Hallehuiah! Praise the Lord!
(For murder and for rape.)

Ring Merry Christmas, Haiti!
(And drown the voodoo drums—
We’ll rob you to the Christian hymns
Until the next Christ comes.)

Ring Merry Christmas, Cuba!
(While Yankee domination
Keeps a nice fat president
In a little half-starved nation.)

And to you down-and-outers,
(”Due to economic laws”)
Oh, eat, drink, and be merry
With a bread-line Santa Claus—

While all the world hails Christmas,
While all the church bells sway!
While, better still, the Christian guns
Proclaim this joyous day!

While holy steel that makes us strong
Spits forth a mighty Yuletide song:
SHOOT Merry Christmas everywhere!
Let Merry Christmas GAS the air!

Published in New Masses, December 1930
(Thanks to Louis Proyect for finding this)

Langston Hughes

The brief secrets are still here,
                            and the light has come back.
The word remember touches my hand,
But I shake it off and watch the turkey buzzards bank and wheel
Against the occluded sky.
All of the little names sink down,
                            weighted with what is invisible,
But no one will utter them, no one will smooth their rumpled hair. 

There isn’t much time, in any case.
There isn’t much left to talk about
                            as the year deflates.
There isn’t a lot to add.
Road-worn, December-colored, they cluster like unattractive angels
Wherever a thing appears,
Crisp and unspoken, unspeakable
                            in their mute and glittering garb.

All afternoon the clouds have been sliding toward us
                                      out of the
      Blue Ridge.
All afternoon the leaves have scuttled
Across the sidewalk and driveway, clicking their clattery claws.
And now the evening is over us,
Small slices of silence
                  running under a dark rain,
Wrapped in a larger.

www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16661

Charles Wright

There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted toilet bowl
The poverty of to steal food for the first time
The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck
The poverty of sweet charity ladling
Soup for the poor who must always be there for that
There’s the poverty of theory poverty of the swollen belly shamed
Poverty of the diploma mill the ballot that goes nowhere
Princes of predation let me tell you
There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of cheap luggage bursted open at immigration
The poverty of the turned head, the averted eyes
The poverty of bored sex of tormented sex
The poverty of the bounced check the poverty of the dumpster dive
The poverty of the pawned horn the poverty of the smashed reading glasses
The poverty pushing the sheeted gurney the poverty cleaning up the puke
The poverty of the pavement artist the poverty passed-out on pavement
Princes of finance you who have not lain there
There are poverties and there are poverties

There is the poverty of hand-to-mouth and door-to-door
And the poverty of stories patched-up to sell there
There’s the poverty of the child thumbing the Interstate
And the poverty of the bride enlisting for war
There’s the poverty of prescriptions who can afford
And the poverty of how would you ever end it
There is the poverty of stones fisted in pocket
And the poverty of the village bulldozed to rubble
Princes of weaponry who have not ever tasted war
There are poverties and there are poverties
There’s the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you
Can’t get to the poverty of the salary cut
There’s the poverty of human labor offered silently on the curb
The poverty of the no-contact prison visit
There’s the poverty of yard sale scrapings spread
And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street
Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words
There are poverties and there are poverties

You who travel by private jet like a housefly
Buzzing with the other flies of plundered poverties
Princes and courtiers who will never learn through words
Here’s a mirror you can look into:  take it:  it’s yours.

For Jim and Arlene Scully
with gratitude to François Villon and to Galway Kinnell

monthlyreview.org/091130rich.php

Adrienne Rich

Originally designed and published in the shape of the island of Manhattan as shown here.

The island’s tip was sliced by a ship canal that tamed the Spuyten Duyvil shoals, but severed Marble Hill from Inwood. Medieval tapestry unicorns grace the Cloisters; a flag-pole and stockade mark old Fort Tryon. Lofty crags overlook the broad Hudson River as bedrock & history anchor the Heights to the George Washington Bridge. Walk east toward the Bronx across High bridge; gaze to the south from Sugar Hill, where trumpeters and tap dancers stepped up into the sun. Ages ago Iapetus (an older Atlantic Ocean) closed; the kiss with Africa heated a melting pot. Lava was injected in veins of rock and coagulated to form Palisade cliffs. The legacy of Algonquian life is hidden in our place names and our meals. The newcomers (first the Dutch, then English, African, Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Greek, Ukrainian, Armenian, Puerto Rican, Pakistani, Cuban, Dominican, Haitian, Filipino, and all) have shed blood in a thousand places, but millions live. Legends of Gotham: Father Knickerbocker, Boss Tweed, Emma Lazarus, Fiorello, the roar of the el, the blizzard of ‘47, Giants at the Polo Grounds. Offshore, barges ply swirling brown water near North River sewage pipes, as striped bass and shad swim up ”the river that flows both ways”: a tidal reach of the sea all the way up to Albany. Brownstone, bodega, ball court & bus stop: on warm nights in Harlem, noisy streets and quiet rooftops. Kids splash around a hydrant as lovers embrace on a Riverside Park bench and rush-hour traffic in stalled on the Triborough Bridge. Some uptown options: gospel choir on Sunday, sooty Grant’s Tomb, hiphop the Apollo, ribs at Sylvia’s, law at Columbia, mangos in El Barrio, peace garden in the Cathedral, rowboat on the Meer, pub-crawl the West Side, listen to poetry at the 92nd St. Y, nosh at Songbirds alight in leafy woods as a turtle lays eggs near a pond in Central Park. Grand museums flank the green with dinosaur bones and Egyptian tombs. When it snows, we ramble out to Sheep Meadow & the Great Lawn; in sunshine, to Strawberry Fields, the Lake, & the Zoo. Buy hot dogs from pushcarts near Madison boutiques, or subways. (Take the A train, ride the Lexington line, or change at 59th Street for the IRT. Catch the F out to Queens.) Gneiss but full of schist, the bedrock sparkles with mica. It bears the weight of midtown; Skyscrapers at Columbus Circle, Fifth Avenue, and Park Avenue. Attend concerts at Carnegie, ice skating shows at Rockefeller Center, Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Our eyes are drawn up to a blue slice of sky as vertical walls enclose us. 100 gridlocked taxis honk at police blockades as Fidel speaks at the U.N. Revelers jam Times Suqare on New Year’s Eve, to jostle and sing as the ball drops. Buses come in (the Lincoln Tunnel) to Port Authority, trains to Grand Central. The lion-flanked public library was once a reservoir; we love the Art Deco classic Chrysler spire. From Hell’s Kitchen walk to broadway, buy tickets for ”Showboat” or ”Cats” - hey, the Knicks won at the buzzer in the Garden! See Macy’s flat parade, then gape from atop the Empire State, where mighty Kong took a fall. Diamond jewelers join fur-clad window shoppers as herds of jaywalkers cross against the light in the Garment District. Graffiti-scrawled boards near the Flatiron Building enclose pits of unconsolidated sediment Consolidated Edison must dig. Workers repair Gramercy Park cables, reroute Chelsea steam pipes, plug a burst main flooding streets by Union Square. (Tap water flows down from the Catskills in deep tunnels; garbage is hauled to a landfill at Fresh Kills.) The riverfront was filled for barnacle-crusted piers, and Minetta Brook wetlands became lots in Greenwich Village. A sweatshop horror: 146 locked-in women lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Watch skateboard demons cavort among panhandlers as old men play chess near the arch in Washington Square, N.Y.U. students, art film fans, coffee drinkers, & East Village poets crowd smoky joints on Saturday night; some cross (the Holland Tunnel) back out to New Jersey. Cheap gallery space is a memory in SoHo; cast-iron lofts rent high, as do TriBeCa warehouses. A bag lady seeks warmth huddled over a sidewalk grate on the Bowery, where Stuyvesant’s farm once spread in old New Amsterdam. The original steal (this island, traded for $24 in beads) lies plastered in muth and concrete, obscured like the African Burial Grounds. A Lower East Side delicatessen sells good chicken soup; enjoy zuppa di pesca at the Festival of San Gennaro, or bird’s nest soup in Chinatown. Marchers to City Hall cross the Brooklyn Bridge to demonstrate, as tourists at South Street Seaport eat lunch with a view. The Fulton Fish Market is mobbed before dawn. Precambrian stocks bond the upper crust with solid foundations below the Trade Towers, Trinity Church and Wall Street. Ferryboats to Staten Island, Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and Governor’s Island depart from wind-swept docks at Battery Park.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/30/opinion/manhattan.html

Howard Horowitz