Page:Slabs of the sunburnt West.djvu/18

Out of the payday songs of steam shovels,
Out of the wages of structural iron rivets,
The living lighted skyscrapers tell it now as a name,
Tell it across miles of sea blue water, gray blue land:

I am Chicago, I am a name given out by the breaths of working men, laughing men, a child, a belonging.

So between the Great Lakes,
The Grand De Tour, and the Grand Prairie,
The living lighted skyscrapers stand,

Spotting the blue dusk with checkers of yellow, streamers of smoke and silver, parallelograms of night-gray watchmen,

Singing a soft moaning song: I am a child, a belonging.
How should the wind songs of a windy city go?
Singing in a high wind the dirty chatter gets blown
away on the wind — the clean shovel,
the clean pickax,
lasts.
It is easy for a child to get breakfast and pack off
to school with a pair of roller skates,
buns for lunch, and a geography.
Riding through a tunnel under a river running backward,
to school to listen . . . how the Pottawattamies . . .
and the Blackhawks . . . ran on moccasins . . .
between Kaskaskia, Peoria, Kankakee, and Chicago.