The summer of nineteen eighteen <br />I read The Jungle and The <br />Research Magnificent. That fall <br />My father died and my aunt <br />Took me to Chicago to live. <br />The first thing I did was to take <br />A streetcar to the stockyards. <br />In the winter afternoon, <br />Gritty and fetid, I walked <br />Through the filthy snow, through the <br />Squalid streets, looking shyly <br />Into the people’s faces, <br />Those who were home in the daytime. <br />Debauched and exhausted faces, <br />Starved and looted brains, faces <br />Like the faces in the senile <br />And insane wards of charity <br />Hospitals. Predatory <br />Faces of little children. <br />Then as the soiled twilight darkened, <br />Under the green gas lamps, and the <br />Sputtering purple arc lamps, <br />The faces of the men coming <br />Home from work, some still alive with <br />The last pulse of hope or courage, <br />Some sly and bitter, some smart and <br />Silly, most of them already <br />Broken and empty, no life, <br />Only blinding tiredness, worse <br />Than any tired animal. <br />The sour smells of a thousand <br />Suppers of fried potatoes and <br />Fried cabbage bled into the street. <br />I was giddy and sick, and out <br />Of my misery I felt rising <br />A terrible anger and out <br />Of the anger, an absolute vow. <br />Today the evil is clean <br />And prosperous, but it is <br />Everywhere, you don’t have to <br />Take a streetcar to find it, <br />And it is the same evil. <br />And the misery, and the <br />Anger, and the vow are the same.<br /><br />Kenneth Rexroth<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-bad-old-days/
