1
The sun was low over the blue morning water;
the waves of the bay were silent on the smooth beach,
where in the night the silver fish had died gasping.

                                       2
Old men and boys search the wet garbage with fingers
and slip pieces in bags.

This fat old man has found the hard end of a bread
and bites it.

                                       3
The girls outshout the machines
and she strains for their words, blushing.

Soon she, too, will speak
their speech glibly.

                                       4
The pedlar who goes from shop to shop,
has seated himself on the stairs in the dim hallway,
and the basket of apples upon his knees, breathes the odor.

                                       5
Her work was to count linings—
the day’s seconds in dozens.

                                       6
They have built red factories along Lake Michigan,
and the purple refuse coils like congers in the green depths.

                                       7
The house-wreckers have left the door and a staircase,
now leading to the empty room of night.

                                       8
Ghetto Funeral
Followed by his lodge, shabby men stumbling over the cobblestones,
and his children, faces red and ugly with tears, eyes and eyelids red,
in the black coffin in the black hearse the old man.

No longer secretly grieving
that his children are not strong enough to go the way he wanted to go
and was not strong enough.

                                       9
Showing a torn sleeve, with stiff and shaking fingers the old man
pulls off a bit of the baked apple, shiny with sugar,
eating with reverence food, the great comforter.