An Old Cracked Tune - Stanley Kunitz
My name is Solomon Levi,
the desert is my home,
my mother's breast was thorny,
and father I had none.
The sands whispered, <i>Be separate</i>,
the stones taught me, <i>Be hard</i>.
I dance, for the joy of surviving,
on the edge of the road.
Note:While being borne forth in the web of tunnels underneath the clanging, steaming, and booming hulk of a city, he spies this poem in the grafitti etched intestines of that human-filled python, and thinks how appropriate a summation it is of living in this city of hustlers, of many stripes and many feathers.
Big Book Of Poetry
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