Page:Slabs of the sunburnt West.djvu/18

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4
The Windy City
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.
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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.
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