...Pressure on people
People on streets
Turned away from it all
Like a blind man
Sat on a fence but it don't work...
~ Queen and David Bowie - Under
Pressure Greatest Hits II (c) 1991
I Sit and Look Out
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of
the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves,
remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected,
gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband - I see the treacherous seducer of young
women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid - I
see these sights on the earth; I see the workings of
battle, pestilence, tyranny - I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea - I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be
kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers,
the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these - All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
Walt
Whitman (1819 - 1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900.