Book Two Letting the Crowds Be Good
To Abraham Lincoln
They stay not in their hold
These stokers,
Stooping to hell
To feed a ship.
Below the ocean floors.
Before their awful doors
Bathed in flame,
I hear their human lives
Drip—drip.
Through the lolling aisles of comrades
In and out of sleep,
Troops of faces
To and fro of happy feet,
They haunt my eyes.
Their murky faces beckon me
From the spaces of the coolness of the sea
Their fitful bodies away against the skies.