High at a window on the nineteenth floor,
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We talked, my friend and I. Across the way,
The iron frame of one new building more
Grew as we watched it, with incessant scream
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Of hoisting engines, iron chirp and drone,
Like giant crickets, 'mid the steel and stone,
Of rivet-drivers, pounding shaft and beam;
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And through the mighty hubbub something gay
Throbbed like a tune, and held one like a dream.
Pipe in his mouth, with nonchalant sure feet,
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One stood above the roaring dizzy street,
Back to the gulf, with careless jesting face,
Waving directions to the engineer,
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Swinging a girder gently into place;
And from a smithy, glowing there in space,
Another to a laughing lad below,
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Straddling a narrow rib of the gaunt frame,
Tossed rivets white and molten—like a game—
Pitcher and catcher; cigarette on lip,
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A battered bucket—if his hand should slip!—
The lad holds out; like two clowns at a show,
Spinning their hats as though the skill were nought,
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The flaming bolts from one to the other go,
Light as a feather in the bucket caught.
So bees work 'mid the hum and roar of hives,
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My friend said: "Do you know
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For each such building men must lose their lives?
It is as sure, almost as sure, as though,
When the contractor figures out the cost,
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So many tons of pressure floor by floor,
He wrote—'So many lives of workmen lost.'
Of course, the figures vary, less or more,
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But always some of these poor lads must die,
Before the topmost story scrapes the sky."
Silent, we watched again the man up there,
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Perched on the edge of nothing, like a fly,
Jesting across his precipice of air,
And wondered if he'd be the one to die.
We watched the bucket, in a kind of dream,
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Catch the candescent bolts the smithy flings,
As though his fellow tossed him some ice-cream—
He lights another cigarette, and sings.
"Always the human sacrifice!" I said—
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And "I remember somewhere to have read
How in old Greece and Rome, and later, too,
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When they would build a temple or a tower—
Things that we go to gaze on, I and you,
Still, in their ruins, lovely as a flower—
In the foundations, that the work might thrive,
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Smiled on by gods above and gods below,
They sometimes buried some poor soul alive—
Much the same thing, though that was long ago!
Yes! there's a bridge in France that spans the Rhone,
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With lordly arches of immortal stone,
Repairing which, 'tis said, some workmen found
A seated skeleton of crumbling bone,
There in a little chamber in the ground,
Guarding with eyeless eyes the bridge's gate;
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Thus was the bridge made safe, the augurs said,
The Gods of Darkness thus propitiate,
For feet of living wayfarers to tread.
The human sacrifice! Now, just as then,
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Here by the Hudson, as there by the Rhone,
These haughty towers on bones of broken men,
Climb to the sky, and glitter in the sun;
Beneath the ball-room floors dead workmen lie,
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Light feet above their nameless ashes glide,
No one remembers when or how they died:
A foot that slipped, a long despairing cry,
A hurrying ambulance with icy clang,
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A muffling sheet, through which the warm blood drips—
Ah! that young voice that from the girder sang. . . .
This cigarette still smoking from his lips!"