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FREEDOMWAYS FIRST QUARTER 1972
This is the place where it's "very well"
if there's not much food to be had. 

Here are the servants of Mr. Babbitt
who send their sons to West Point, 
and the guys who call, "Hello baby!,"
smoking light tobacco and joints.
Here are the dancers of fox-trots,
the jazz-band boys dressed in silk, 
and Miami-Palm Beach tourists with
"bread and butter, coffee and milk..."
Here absurd young syphilitics 
for whom the opium is chic, 
boasting of spirochetes contracted
and buying new suits every week.
Yes, here's the cream of Port-au-Prince,
Havana's high-life, Kingston's peers,
and slaves who row dramatic galleons
over bitter seas of tears.

And many more who have no names,
who work in the forge's white-hot flames
where slowly, slowly there is cast
a Titan's fist; they strike at last 
the glowing spark in fields long dry.
They shout, "Arise!," and hear the cry
"Arise!," from other men whose blood enraged
runs hot against the insults of an age.

Oh, what of these unnamed
who work in the forge's flame?
Shoulder to shoulder, there the ones
who stand and do what must be done. 
With gentle, generous hands they give. 
They're brothers of the Black who lives
bent double by the work he gets,
and drowning in his very sweat.
They're brothers of the white who knows that humans used as clay
for molding with a bootheel of a whiplash once a day
will at last protest and loose a vengeful cry
like barbarous roars of thunder opening the sky.
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