A friend of mine, Dorothy Day, had been put in the women’s prison at 6th Avenue and 8th Street, for her part in a protest. Well, once a week at this place, on a Saturday, the girls were marched down for a shower. A group were being ushered in when one, a whore, loudly proclaimed:
Hundreds have lived without love,
But none without waterA line from a poem of mine which had just appeared in The New Yorker. When I heard this I knew I hadn’t written in vain!
W.H. Auden