Explore "Shack Dye" by Edgar Lee Masters on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The white men played all sorts of jokes on me.
They took big fish off my hook / And put little ones on, while I was away / Getting a stringer, and made me believe / I hadn't seen aright the fish I had caught.
When Burr Robbins circus came to town / They got the ring master to let a tame leopard / Into the ring, and made me believe / I was whipping a wild beast like Samson / When I, for an offer of fifty dollars, / Dragged him out to his cage.
One time I entered my blacksmith shop / And shook as I saw some horse-shoes crawling / Across the floor, as if alive --
Walter Simmons had put a magnet / Under the barrel of water.
Yet every one of you, you white men, / Was fooled about fish and about leopards too, / And you didn't know any more than the horse-shoes did / What moved you about Spoon River.