| |
| TAKE your fill of intimate remorse, perfumed sorrow, | |
| Over the dead child of a millionaire, | |
| And the pity of Death refusing any check on the bank | |
| Which the millionaire might order his secretary to scratch off | |
| And get cashed. | 5 |
| |
| Very well, | |
| You for your grief and I for mine. | |
| Let me have a sorrow my own if I want to. | |
| |
| I shall cry over the dead child of a stockyards hunky. | |
| His job is sweeping blood off the floor. | 10 |
| He gets a dollar seventy cents a day when he works | |
| And it’s many tubs of blood he shoves out with a broom day by day. | |
| |
| Now his three year old daughter | |
| Is in a white coffin that cost him a week’s wages. | |
| Every Saturday night he will pay the undertaker fifty cents till the debt is wiped out. | 15 |
| |
| The hunky and his wife and the kids | |
| Cry over the pinched face almost at peace in the white box. | |
| |
| They remember it was scrawny and ran up high doctor bills. | |
| They are glad it is gone for the rest of the family now will have more to eat and wear. | |
| |
| Yet before the majesty of Death they cry around the coffin | 20 |
| And wipe their eyes with red bandanas and sob when the priest says, “God have mercy on us all.” | |
| |
| I have a right to feel my throat choke about this. | |
| You take your grief and I mine—see? | |
| To-morrow there is no funeral and the hunky goes back to his job sweeping blood off the floor at a dollar seventy cents a day. | |
| All he does all day long is keep on shoving hog blood ahead of him with a broom. | 25 |
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