Time spins like a crazy dial in his brain,
And night by night
I see the love-gesture of his arm
In its green-greasy coat-sleeve
Circling the Book,
And the candles gleaming starkly
On the blotched-paper whiteness of his face,
Like a miswritten psalm...
Night by night
I hear his lifted praise,
Like a broken whinnying
Before the Lord's shut gate.
Sadie dresses in black.
She has black-wet hair full of cold lights
And a fine-drawn face, too white.
All day the power machines
Drone in her ears...
All day the fine dust flies
Till throats are parched and itch
And the heat--like a kept corpse--
Fouls to the last corner.
Then--when needles move more slowly on the cloth
And sweaty fingers slacken
And hair falls in damp wisps over the eyes--
Sped by some power within,
Sadie quivers like a rod...
A thin black piston flying,
One with her machine.
She--who stabs the piece-work with her bitter eye
And bids the girls: "Slow down--
You'll have him cutting us again!"
She--fiery static atom,
Held in place by the fierce pressure all about--
Speeds up the driven wheels
And biting steel--that twice
Has nipped her to the bone.
Nights, she reads
Those books that have most unset thought,
New-poured and malleable,
To which her thought
Leaps fusing at white heat,
Or spits her fire out in some dim manger of a hall,
Or at a protest meeting on the Square,
Her lit eyes kindling the mob.
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