Page:Main Street and other poems, Kilmer, 1917.djvu/20

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MAIN STREET AND OTHER POEMS


MAIN STREET (continued)

A city street that is busy and wide is ground by a thousand wheels,
And a burden of traffic on its breast is all it ever feels:
It is dully conscious of weight and speed and of work that never ends,
But it cannot be human like Main Street, and recognise its friends.


There were only about a hundred teams on Main Street in a day,
And twenty or thirty people, I guess, and some children out to play.
And there wasn't a wagon or buggy, or a man or a girl or a boy
That Main Street didn't remember, and somehow seem to enjoy.


The truck and the motor and trolley car and the elevated train

They make the weary city street reverberate with pain:

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