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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Louise Brooke

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Brick-dust

Louise Brooke

IT’S just a heap of ruin,

A drunken brick carouse—

This thing my spirit grew in

That once was called a house.

An attic where I scribbled

Through baking summer days,

While street-pianos nibbled

At the patient Marseillaise.

The spider-landlord squatted

In a web of dinner-smells,

And people slowly rotted

In little gossip-hells.

I hated all I learned there—

And yet I could have cried

For a little oil I burned there,

A little dream that died.