The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!”

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

What good luck! She has found his bones.

The kilt, devised for workers To wear among the dusty clattering looms. Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader, The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.” Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

A third before he dropped her put her arms    Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down, Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

The witness in a building across the street Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step Up to the windowsill, then held her out Away from the masonry wall and let her drop. And then another. As if he were helping them up To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven. One hundred and forty-six died in the flames On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter, The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union, The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break Or talking money or politics while one fitted This armpiece with its overseam to the band

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams, The nearly invisible stitches along the collar Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

A skirt of flamesdances around herat dusk.

We stand with our handshanging at our sides,while she burns          like a sack of dry ice.

She burns like oil on water.She burns like a cattail torchdipped in gasoline.She glows like the fat tipof a banker's cigar,      silent as quicksilver.A tiger under a rainbow   at nightfall.She burns like a shot glass of vodka.She burns like a field of poppiesat the edge of a rain forest.She rises like dragonsmoke    to my nostrils.She burns like a burning bushdriven by a godawful wind.

At daybreak      she burns like a piece of paper.She burns like foxfirein a thigh-shaped valley.

The cry I bring down from the hillsbelongs to a girl still burninginside my head.

Or does it explode?

Maybe it just sags       like a heavy load

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or fester like a sore—       And then run?

      Does it dry up       like a raisin in the sun?

What happens to a dream deferred?

hitting the floor with a wild, headlong motion for the game he loved like a country and swiveling back to see an orange blur    floating perfectly through the net.

while the power-forward explodes past them    in a fury, taking the ball into the air by himself now and laying it gently    against the glass for a lay-up, but losing his balance in the process,    inexplicably falling, hitting the floor

A hook shot kisses the rim and hangs there, helplessly, but doesn’t drop, and for once our gangly starting center    boxes out his man and times his jump perfectly, gathering the orange leather    from the air like a cherished possession

A hook shot kisses the rim and hangs there, helplessly, but doesn’t drop,

in the many many mornings-after;in the chalk and choke.

I call for youcultivation of strength to heal and enhancein the non-cheering dark,

Overwhat wants to crumble you down, to sickenyou.

I call for youcultivation of victory Overlong blows that you want to give and blows you are going to get

in the hot paralysis.Under the wolves and coyotes of particular silences.

Dark gardeningin the vertigo cold.

I call for you cultivation of strength in the dark.

But oftentimes, among my mind,A Glee possesseth me

And though I had no Gown of Gauze ‑No Ringlet, to my Hair,

Till I was out of sight, in sound,The House encore me so

Nor hopped for Audiences ‑ like Birds ‑One Claw opon the air