Spoon River Anthology | Page 5

write me letters,?The eternal silence of you spoke instead.?And the Black-eyed cocotte took the tears for hers,?As well as the deceiving kisses I gave her.?Somehow, from that hour, I had a new vision?Dear Emily Sparks!
Emily Sparks
Where is my boy, my boy?In what far part of the world??The boy I loved best of all in the school?--?I, the teacher, the old maid, the virgin heart,?Who made them all my children.?Did I know my boy aright,?Thinking of him as a spirit aflame,?Active, ever aspiring??Oh, boy, boy, for whom I prayed and prayed?In many a watchful hour at night,?Do you remember the letter I wrote you?Of the beautiful love of Christ??And whether you ever took it or not,?My, boy, wherever you are,?Work for your soul's sake,?That all the clay of you, all of the dross of you,?May yield to the fire of you,?Till the fire is nothing but light!...?Nothing but light!
Trainor, the Druggist
Only the chemist can tell, and not always the chemist,?What will result from compounding?Fluids or solids.?And who can tell?How men and women will interact?On each other, or what children will result??There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife,?Good in themselves, but evil toward each other;?He oxygen, she hydrogen,?Their son, a devastating fire.?I Trainor, the druggist, a miser of chemicals,?Killed while making an experiment,?Lived unwedded.
Daisy Fraser
Did you ever hear of Editor Whedon?Giving to the public treasury any of the money he received?For supporting candidates for office??Or for writing up the canning factory?To get people to invest??Or for suppressing the facts about the bank,?When it was rotten and ready to break??Did you ever hear of the Circuit Judge?Helping anyone except the "Q" railroad,?Or the bankers? Or did Rev. Peet or Rev. Sibley?Give any part of their salary, earned by keeping still,?Or speaking out as the leaders wished them to do,?To the building of the water works??But I Daisy Fraser who always passed?Along the street through rows of nods and smiles,?And caughs and words such as "there she goes."?Never was taken before Justice Arnett?Without contributing ten dollars and costs?To the school fund of Spoon River!
Benjamin Fraser
THEIR spirits beat upon mine?Like the wings of a thousand butterflies.?I closed my eyes and felt their spirits vibrating.?I closed my eyes, yet I knew when their lashes?Fringed their cheeks from downcast eyes,?And when they turned their heads;?And when their garments clung to them,?Or fell from them, in exquisite draperies.?Their spirits watched my ecstasy?With wide looks of starry unconcern.?Their spirits looked upon my torture;?They drank it as it were the water of life;?With reddened cheeks, brightened eyes,?The rising flame of my soul made their spirits gilt,?Like the wings of a butterfly drifting suddenly into sunlight. And they cried to me for life, life, life.?But in taking life for myself,?In seizing and crushing their souls,?As a child crushes grapes and drinks?From its palms the purple juice,?I came to this wingless void,?Where neither red, nor gold, nor wine,?Nor the rhythm of life are known.
Minerva Jones
I AM Minerva, the village poetess,?Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street?For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,?And all the more when "Butch" Weldy?Captured me after a brutal hunt.?He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;?And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,?Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.?Will some one go to the village newspaper,?And gather into a book the verses I wrote?--?I thirsted so for love?I hungered so for life!
"Indignation" Jones
You would not believe, would you?That I came from good Welsh stock??That I was purer blooded than the white trash here??And of more direct lineage than the?New Englanders And Virginians of Spoon River??You would not believe that I had been to school?And read some books.?You saw me only as a run-down man?With matted hair and beard?And ragged clothes.?Sometimes a man's life turns into a cancer?From being bruised and continually bruised,?And swells into a purplish mass?Like growths on stalks of corn.?Here was I, a carpenter, mired in a bog of life?Into which I walked, thinking it was a meadow,?With a slattern for a wife, and poor Minerva, my daughter,?Whom you tormented and drove to death.?So I crept, crept, like a snail through the days?Of my life.?No more you hear my footsteps in the morning,?Resounding on the hollow sidewalk?Going to the grocery store for a little corn meal?And a nickel's worth of bacon.
"Butch" Weldy
AFTER I got religion and steadied down?They gave me a job in the canning works,?And every morning I had to fill?The tank in the yard with gasoline,?That fed the blow-fires in the sheds?To heat the soldering irons.?And I mounted a rickety ladder to do it,?Carrying buckets full of the stuff.?One morning, as I stood there pouring,?The air grew still and seemed to heave,?And I shot up as the tank exploded,?And down I came with both legs broken,?And my eyes burned crisp as a