Leon Srabian - The City (1925)
Forgotten Poems #35
—: The City :—
The city is a monster
Swallowing what comes within its reach.
The groves on the hilltops
Are perturbed sentinels
Warning the fields.
But the city is a far crawling dinosaur,
With its factory-claws
Already at the vitals of the field.
Leon Herald Srabian (1896-1976)
P: This Quarter (1925); C: This Waking Hour (1925), etc.
Emigrated from Armenia to America in 1912 with his family. Studied at the University of Wisconsin, where he befriended fellow poets Zona Gale and Marianne Moore. In 1925 moved to New York, just after publishing his first book of poems, This Waking Hour, dedicated to the one million Armenian lives lost at the hands of the Ottoman empire in 1915-16.
Was a tireless “advocate for the working-class” and a member of the League of American Writers, led by the Communist Party of the USA, alongside Conrad Aiken, W.H. Auden, Maxwell Bodenheim, Countee Cullen, Sarah Bard Field, Albert Einstein, et al.
I am reminded of ‘Ennui’ by Langston Hughes;
It’s such a Bore Always being Poor
And an old haiku of mine;
sunrise— the minimum wage falls xoxo dw
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More poems about monsters . . .
Prescient. I sympathize with the poet and his CPUSA background.. Alot of the intelligentsia dabbled with it but recoiled from the party discipline required of dedicated members. Some of the most idealistic people of that generation considered themselves communists. Like this poet, they are forgotten figures.
Your working class haiku was great. "Nothing's too good for the workers!"