JOY by JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

BY a street-organ stands a minstrel bawling:
Dirty children are out of courtyards crawling:
Drunken women come reeling from a bar:
Drunken loafers, as many as there are:
Blotched blue scarecrows, up and down they go,
With staggering steps and garments flapping wild,
To foot it raggedly over the greasy snow
Slop-stained and littered, sooty and defiled,
Grabbed at and sucked at by the babies sprawling,
Where the organ palpitates and men are bawling
To drown the clatter of pots and the children calling.
Under a sky which is one smudge of soot,
Bleary and slattern we go hopping and hobbling:
To a rattling tune, forgetting an instant our squabbling,
The toil and disease and mockery and mud.
Even as Adam danced in the Garden of God,
When the sky was clean and the earth without scar or sore
On the back of her, but lovely from shore to shore,
So do we dance, and shall, although the good
Old sun be put out and all the earth go toppling,
And God grow weary of man and his broken lute,
And the dirt of life, and the flies, and the women squabbling.

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