Page:Poems for Workers - ed. Manuel Gomez (1925).djvu/47

 Graceland

By CARL SANDBURG

Tomb of a millionaire,

A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,

Place of the dead where they spend every year

The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars

For upkeep and flowers

To keep fresh the memory of the dead.

The merchant prince gone to dust

Commanded in his written will

Over the signed name of his last testament

Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside

For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,

For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance

Around his last long home.

(A hundred cash girls want nickles to go to the movies

tonight.

In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at

tables

Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose

silver dollars in their pockets.

In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or

dress goods or leather stuff for six dollars a week

wages

And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she

is reckless about God and the newspapers and the

police, the talk of her home town or the name

people call her.)