free-verse90 lines

Cities Of The Plain

by Edgar Lee Masters

Where are the cabalists, the insidious committees,

The panders who betray the idiot cities

For miles and miles toward the prairie sprawled,

Ignorant, soul-less, rich,

Smothered in fumes of pitch?

* * * * *

Rooms of mahogany in tall sky scrapers

See the unfolding and the folding up

Of ring-clipped papers,

And letters which keep drugged the public cup.

The walls hear whispers and the semi-tones

Of voices in the corner, over telephones

Muffled by Persian padding, gemmed with brass spittoons.

Butts of cigars are on the glass topped table,

And through the smoke, gracing the furtive Babel,

The bishop's picture blesses the picaroons,

Who start or stop the life of millions moving

Unconscious of obedience, the plastic

Yielders to satanic and dynastic

Hands of reproaching and approving.

* * * * *

Here come knights armed,

But with their arms concealed,

And rubber heeled.

Here priests and wavering want are charmed.

And shadows fall here like the shark's

In messages received or sent.

Signals are flying from the battlement.

And every president

Of rail, gas, coal and oil, the parks,

The receipt of custom knows, without a look,

Their meaning as the code is in no book.

The treasonous cracksmen of the city's wealth

Watch for the flags of stealth!

* * * * *

Acres of coal lie fenced along the tracks.

Tracks ribbon the streets, and beneath the streets

Wires for voices, fire, thwart the plebiscites,

And choke the counsels and symposiacs

Of dreamers who have pity for the backs

That bear and bleed.

All things are theirs: tracks, wires, streets and coal,

The church's creed,

The city's soul,

The city's sea girt loveliness,

The merciless and meretricious press.

* * * * *

Far up in a watch-tower, where the news is printed,

Gray faces and bright eyes, weary and cynical

Discuss fresh wonders of the old cabal.

But nothing of its work in type is hinted:

Taxes are high! The mentors of the town

Must keep their taxes down

On buildings, presses, stocks

In gas, oil, coal and docks.

The mahogany rooms conceal a spider man

Who holds the taxing bodies through the church,

And knights with arms concealed. The mentors search

The spider man, the master publican,

And for his friendship silence keep,

Letting him herd the populace like sheep

For self and for the insatiable desires

Of coal and tracks and wires,

Pick judges, legislators,

And tax-gatherers.

Or name his favorites, whom they name:

The slick and sinistral,

Servitors of the cabal,

For praise which seems the equivalent of fame:

Giving to the delicate handed crackers

Of priceless safes, the spiritual slackers,

The flash and thunder of front pages!

And the gulled millions stare and fling their wages

Where they are bidden, helpless and emasculate.

And the unilluminate,

Whose brows are brass,

Who weep on every Sabbath day

For Jesus riding on an ass,

Scarce know the ass is they,

Now ridden by his effigy,

The publican with Jesus' painted mask,

Along a way where fumes of odorless gas

First spur then fell them from the task.

* * * * *

Through the parade runs swift the psychic cackle

Like thorns beneath a boiling pot that crackle.

And the angels say to Yahveh looking down

From the alabaster railing, on the town,

O, cackle, cackle, cackle, crack and crack

We wish we had our little Sodom back!