Classic Poem

" Forty days ... forty days ... forty days. . . "
It seemed to have been going on forever;
Not phrases, not even words — only a sound,
Like a door with rusty hinges swinging in the wind.

Then I noticed him — the remnant of a man.
Never have I beheld a thing so smashed and tattered as that man's face;
His sixty years or more,
With all their records, all the hard learned, careful craftiness,
Were nothing more than years.
Something had crushed and mangled him into a gray pulp.
Could he have stood up straight he would have towered above me.
I had to bend to hear him.
Hungry he was for talk.
He tried to hold back and be still;
But, like flooding streams breaking a puny dam,
Out of his mind rushed a mad torrent of speech.
So wild, so muttering fierce it came,
It was some time before I caught his drift —
Feeling only, like the tide in a swirling current,
His pulsing, insistent " Forty days . . . . forty days. . . "

" Forty days — that's all — just forty days. . .
I come from Pforzheim — foreman in the shop I was, too;
Head of the tool-room, a fine place, light and cool in summer.
Best machines in the country — I took care of them like children.
(You should see those mills now: — cartridge-blanks dropping where we used to press up crosses!)
Forty days ... only forty days. . .
Forty days — just like the old times — you can read it in the Bible:
" Forty days there were of flood; forty days of fasting." — hein?
Yes, forty days of fools running round and stabbing other fools; and all of them praying to God to help them;
And the whole world going to smash.
I almost went mad myself.
My son (curse him!) the worst fool of the lot, went along with them,
Singing louder than a drunken man. . .
We were more like brothers, we two; we never had had a quarrel.
I could have killed him when he said " Good-by, "
And the boys in the street shouted godspeed
And a couple of women nudged each other and looked sneeringly at me.
Ya!&mdash what did I care! I wanted none of their fool's glory. . .
Then I had to clear out after all.
They made me go along. — My God, those forty days!
A hundred million acres ruined by the armies, the gray vultures!
Cannon in the wheat-fields and orchards rotting in the poisoned smoke;
The tramping, and the iron rain that never stopped, and the sickness, and the young boys going crazy. . .

And forty days ago I had been working on a draw-plate,
And the men were standing around me, gossiping at lunch-time;
And Adolph (he was the favorite) was late with the beer.
I remember how we all waited, thirsty and joking.
And Karl, my assistant, said, " Well, I hope he don't drink my share. . ."
And then he came in with the news.
Forty days ago ... only forty days.
It isn't possible. . . "

I left him, still mumbling and twisting on his cot;
His filmed eyes did not even follow me.