Poetry Archives

Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau

You have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.
You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only
     one thumb.
You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and
     win all the world’s honors, but when you come back
     home the print of the one thumb your mother gave
     you is the same print of thumb you had in the old
     home when your mother kissed you and said good-by.
Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men
and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one anothers’
     throats for room to stand and among them all
     are not two thumbs alike.
Somewhere is a Great God of Thumbs who can tell the
     inside story of this.