Chicago Poems/Fellow Citizens
FELLOW CITIZENS
I drank musty ale at the Illinois Athletic Club with the millionaire manufacturer of Green River butter one night
And his face had the shining light of an old-time Quaker, he spoke of a beautiful daughter, and I knew he had a peace and a happiness up his sleeve somewhere.
Then I heard Jim Kirch make a speech to the Advertising Association on the trade resources of South America.
And the way he lighted a three-for-a-nickel stogie and cocked it at an angle regardless of the manners of our best people,
I knew he had a clutch on a real happiness even though some of the reporters on his newspaper say he is the living double of Jack London's Sea Wolf.
In the mayor's office the mayor himself told me he was happy though it is a hard job to satisfy all the office-seekers and eat all the dinners he is asked to eat.
Down in Gilpin Place, near Hull House, was a man with his jaw wrapped for a bad toothache,
And he had it all over the butter millionaire, Jim Kirch and the mayor when it came to happiness.
He is a maker of accordions and guitars and not only makes them from start to finish, but plays them after he makes them.
And he had a guitar of mahogany with a walnut bottom he offered for seven dollars and a half if I wanted it,
And another just like it, only smaller, for six dollars, though he never mentioned the price till I asked him,
And he stated the price in a sorry way, as though the music and the make of an instrument count for a million times more than the price in money.
I thought he had a real soul and knew a lot about God.
There was light in his eyes of one who has conquered sorrow in so far as sorrow is conquerable or worth conquering.
Anyway he is the only Chicago citizen I was jealous of that day.
He played a dance they play in some parts of Italy when the harvest of grapes is over and the wine presses are ready for work.