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We put John Kennedy in the White House and we wait for times to change. They say legislation is rolling in our favor. They say big roads are coming in. Two years pass and I'm still not working. They got a twelve story monster now can do the work of a hundred miners. Little mines close and die. Men by thousands go to Ohio and Michigan, Kentucky, hunting jobs of work. Where can I go? Maybe Kennedy can't do what Roosevelt did, if times don't allow. A president is only human, maybe. THREE POEMS by Joan Moore SPRING for Mary I, aching to be forced through ecstasy to bloom, went into the garden. Sank up to my hot lap in snow. Fell into frozen fire of rose. Bled ice from burning wounds, prayed god for violets to staunch them. Then heard -a song. Saw, in the black switches of an appletree, its little breast now mudstained as my own white dress, a sparrow. Its throat a downy bellows that once beginning, never ceased to pump. All day, all night blew on that silver tune until it seemed the moon, melting with joy, was coming down; my bloom, rendered by ecstasy, was coming up. 33 WAKING I see this morning that the dark has turned thick in its socket, slopping like buttermilk in bucket. How could that rising tide of night so quickly run amuck? Where was to run, my lovely sky? Was that not you who last night nursed me with your black milk? Oh. Ego's gone berserk again. Now more alive, I realize that it is only I come back from too long and warm a sleep with clabbered eyes. THE POLITICS OF INVENTION (Poem from the Sticks) These little poems running in and through and out of me, these tiny melodies, just small enough to fit in fairy pipes, ah me! — if there were fairies; this little brook of poetry, what does it think it's doing, rushing out of nowhere, running through this room and out again, vanishing before the dew? I ask and get no answer, except cacaphony, quite deafening, that's roaring up the valleys of this state: those monster sons waking up their Father. I know I cannot serve this monstrous nation by babbling, but I would serve something — go to work. So I think that if a million babbling brooks, pulled by a million stunning fairies piping, were in megalopolis turned loose, that might be of service to Him. And wonder if they'll ask me to come in and run. 34 ...

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