William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. (1878–1962). Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1920.

Brick-Dust

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.

Poetry, A Magazine of Verse