Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 153

Two brothers dance forward on the mud stage

The guards blow their whistles & chase them in rage

Why are these infants massed in this place

Laughing in play & pushing for space

Why do they wait here so cheerful & dread

Why this is the House where they give children bread

The man in the bread door Cries & comes out

Thousands of boys & girls Take up his shout

Is it joy? is it prayer? “No more bread today”

Thousands of Children at once scream “Hooray!”

Run home to tents where elders await

Messenger children with bread from the state

No bread more today! & no place to squat

Painful baby, sick shit he has got.

Malnutrition skulls thousands for months

Dysentery drains bowels all at once

Nurse shows disease card Enterostrep

Suspension is wanting or else chlorostrep

Refugee camps in hospital shacks

Newborn lay naked on mothers’ thin laps

Monkeysized week-old Rheumatic babe eye

Gastroenteritis Blood Poison thousands must die

September Jessore Road rickshaw

50,000 souls in one camp I saw

Rows of bamboo huts in the flood

Open drains, & wet families waiting for food

Border trucks flooded, food cant get past,

American Angel machine please come fast!

Where is Ambassador Bunker today?

Are his Helios machinegunning children at play?

Where are the helicopters of U.S. AID?

Smuggling dope in Bangkok’s green shade.

Where is America’s Air Force of Light?

Bombing North Laos all day and all night?

Where are the President’s Armies of Gold?

Billionaire Navies merciful Bold?

Bringing us medicine food and relief?

Napalming North Vietnam and causing more grief?

Where are our tears? Who weeps for this pain?

Where can these families go in the rain?

Jessore Road’s children close their big eyes

Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?

Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?

Who can bring bread to this shit flood foul’d lair?

Millions of children alone in the rain!

Millions of children weeping in pain!

Ring O ye tongues of the world for their woe

Ring out ye voices for Love we dont know

Ring out ye bells of electrical pain

Ring in the conscious American brain

How many children are we who are lost

Whose are these daughters we see turn to ghost?

What are our souls that we have lost care?

Ring out ye musics and weep if you dare—

Cries in the mud by the thatch’d house sand drain

Sleeps in huge pipes in the wet shit-field rain

waits by the pump well, Woe to the world!

whose children still starve in their mothers’ arms curled.

Is this what I did to myself in the past?

What shall I do Sunil Poet I asked?

Move on and leave them without any coins?

What should I care for the love of my loins?

What should we care for our cities and cars?

What shall we buy with our Food Stamps on Mars?

How many millions sit down in New York

& sup this night’s table on bone & roast pork?

How many million beer cans are tossed

in Oceans of Mother? How much does She cost?

Cigar gasolines and asphalt car dreams

Stinking the world and dimming star beams—

Finish the war in your breast with a sigh

Come taste the tears in your own Human eye

Pity us millions of phantoms you see

Starved in Samsara on planet TV

How many millions of children die more

before our Good Mothers perceive the Great Lord?

How many good fathers pay tax to rebuild

Armed forces that boast the children they’ve killed?

How many souls walk through Maya in pain

How many babes in illusory rain?

How many families hollow eyed lost?

How many grandmothers turning to ghost?

How many loves who never get bread?

How many Aunts with holes in their head?

How many sisters skulls on the ground?

How many grandfathers make no more sound?

How many fathers in woe

How many sons nowhere to go?

How many daughters nothing to eat?

How many uncles with swollen sick feet?

Millions of babies in pain

Millions of mothers in rain

Millions of brothers in woe

Millions of children nowhere to go

New York, November 14–16, 1971

IX

MIND BREATHS ALL OVER THE PLACE

(1972–1977)

Sad Dust Glories (1972–1974)

Ego Confessions (1974–1977)

Sad Dust Glories