Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, BREAD LINES, by HARRY HIBBARD KEMP


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

BREAD LINES, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Good god! What keeps men up so late / upon this dripping night
Last Line: "some day they'll have to answer us, whether they will or no!"
Subject(s): Depressions, Economic; Hunger; Poverty; Recessions


GOOD God! What keeps men up so late upon this dripping night
When every rain-wet paving stone shines with its blur of light
Caught from the white electric arc? The wind is blowing chill,
No human foot would wend abroad save at some master's will ...
And these men have a master terribler than mortal lord,
Whose pity might be wakened and whose mercy be implored;
The lord of them is Hunger fell who whips them as they go,—
With dreadful scourge of famine he insults them, blow on blow.
They turn and twist in silent line and shuffle hopeless feet
In solemn drear procession down the shadow-haunted street
They tramp along while other folk are safe and warm in bed;
They move in line for half a night to gain their dole of bread,
And hunger makes them patient of the cold, the sleet, the rain,—
But every weary step they take finds echo in the brain,
And the heart becomes the pavement, and it spirts with jets of pain.

Ye masters, why must this thing be? Is this the exacted price
(This sordidness and misery and poverty and vice)
For every upward step Man takes along the sunlit way?
Why must these edges of the night still fringe the rear of day?
The masters answer nothing: they will neither hear nor see;
They play, with men as checkers, at their game of usury;
They reap where they have never toiled, they sell the unsown grain,
They make the worker moil for them nor heed his cry of pain.
Their tasks are busy idleness which sow no good for men,
They spread their nets and catch their fish and spread their nets again—
But shadowy bread lines throng my heart and whisper, stern and low,
"Some day they'll have to answer us, whether they will or no!"





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