I WAITED today for a freight train to pass. Cattle cars with steers butting their horns against the bars, went by. And a half a dozen hoboes stood on bumpers between cars. Well, the cattle are respectable, I thought. Every steer has its transportation paid for by the farmer sending it to market, While the hoboes are law-breakers in riding a railroad train without a ticket. It reminded me of ten days I spent in the Allegheny County jail in Pittsburgh. I got ten days even though I was a veteran of the Spanish-American war. Cooped in the same cell with me was an old man, a bricklayer and a booze-fighter. But it just happened he, too, was a veteran soldier, and he had fought to preserve the Union and free the niggers. We were three in all, the other being a Lithuanian who got drunk on pay day at the steel works and got to fighting a policeman; All the clothes he had was a shirt, pants and shoes -- somebody got his hat and coat and what money he had left over when he got drunk. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE ELEPHANT by HILAIRE BELLOC PORTRAIT OF A BABY by STEPHEN VINCENT BENET THE LOVER IN HELL by STEPHEN VINCENT BENET UNTITLED, 1968; FOR MARK ROTHKO by JAMES GALVIN THE WILLOW by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON DEAR ELIZABETH: (FOR ELIZABETH DIFIORE) by KAREN SWENSON |