Upton Sinclair, ed. (18781968).
The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest. 1915.
By Carl Sandburg
(Contemporary American poet)
|I HAVE been watching the war map slammed up for advertising in front of the newspaper office.|
|Buttonsred and yellow buttonsblue and black buttonsare shoved back and forth across the map.|
|A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,|
|Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,|
|And then fixes a yellow button one inch west|| 5|
|And follows the yellow button with a black button one inch west.|
|(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak along a river edge,|
|Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in their throats.)|
|Who by Christ would guess what it cost to move two buttons one inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing to us?|