From Phyllis McGinley’s Stones from a Glass House.

Admonition

(To the Chicago Daily Times, which is advocating a one-day smokers’ fast to relieve the cigarette shortage)

O Times, O reckless journal,
O sheet unblest!
What is this mischief, this design infernal
That you suggest?
Let smokers for one dreary day and night
Absent themselves, you say, from all delight.
Then we might see the secret stores unlocked,
The Luckies back, the shelves with Camels stocked.
Perhaps. I merely tender this advice:
Consider the Price.

Consider a nation
Biting its nails and wrestling with temptation
For twenty-four desperate hours.
Think of the tempers poised on murder’s brink,
Of men at morning fainting in their showers,
Or driven, at eve, to drink.

Think, think
Of the vast quarrels let loose, the evil forces,
The words across the tables, the divorces,
Tots scurrying from the path
Of strange parental wrath,
Bosses, for once unwary,
Firing the blond and guiltless secretary,
Collaborations coming to an end,
Friend bickering with friend,
The innocent delivered to the furies
Of untobaccoed juries,
Deals lost, wives beaten, relatives told off,
And all for lack of a carload and a cough.

Through the small haze which wreathes about me yet
(From what now passes for a cigarette),
I conjure up the horrors of that day,
And, gentlemen, I say,
Resign your scheme. Quick, take your project back.
Better the lack,
The scramble, the shortage, the barley-flavored brand
Than anarchy across this smiling land.
Better, I cry, a bottleneck met head on
Than Armageddon.