#38: Have you seen men handed refusals
by
Carl Sandburg

Have you seen men handed refusals
     till they began to laugh
     at the notion of ever landing a job again--
Muttering with the laugh,
     "It's driving me nuts and the family too,"
Mumbling of hoodoos and jinx,
     fear of defeat creeping in their vitals--
Have you never seen this?
     or do you kid yourself
     with the fond soothing syrup of four words
     "Some folks won't work"??
Of course some folks won't work--
     they are sick or wornout or lazy
     or misled with the big idea
the idle poor should imitate the idle rich.

Have you seen women and kids
     step out and hustle for the family
     some in night life on the streets
     some fighting other women and kids
     for the leavings of fruit and vegetable markets
     or searching alleys and garbage dumps for scraps?

Have you seen them with savings gone
     furniture and keepsakes pawned
     and the pawntickets blown away in cold winds?
     by one letdown and another ending
     in what you might call slums--

To be named perhaps in case reports
     and tabulated and classified
     among those who have crossed over
     from the employables into the unemployables?

What is the saga of the employables?
     what are the breaks they get?
What are the dramas of personal fate
     spilled over from industrial transitions?
     what punishments handed bottom people
     who have wronged no man's house
     or things or person?

     Stocks are property, yes.
     Bonds are property, yes.
Machines, land, buildings, are property, yes.
     A job is property,
     no, nix, nah nah.

The rights of property are guarded
     by ten thousand laws and fortresses.
The right of a man to live by his work--
     what is this right?
     and why does it clamor?
     and who can hush it
     so it will stay hushed?
     and why does it speak
     and though put down speak again
     with strengths out of the eath?

From The People, Yes (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1936).
This poem is in the public domain.