Statistics
- Sixty souls, this day, will arrange for travel to brighter
- lands and bluer skies.
- At sunset, two thousand will stop for a moment to watch
- birds flying south.
- In five thousand rooms the shades will be drawn, with the
- lamps adjusted, the tables prepared, and the cards
- arranged for solitaire.
- This day, ninety-four will divorce, while thirty-three
- persons meet great, though unexpected, financial
- success.
- Twenty-one, on this day, will elect to die.
- These are the figures incontrovertibly; such are the facts.
- Sixty, two thousand, five thousand, ninety-four, thirty-
- three, twenty-one.
- Actuary of actuaries, when these ordained numbers shall
- have been fulfilled at the scheduled hour,
- What shall be done to prove and redeem them, to explain
- and preserve them?
- How shall these accounts be balanced, otherwise than in
- personal flesh and blood?
- By cold addition subtraction? And on what fiery
- comptometer?
- Because the need for an answer that is correct is very great.
~ Kenneth Fearing, New Yorker 15 Nov 1941;32.
(See Kenneth Fearing Complete Poems, edited by Robert M. Ryley,
National Poetry Foundation, 1994.)
