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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Ghetto and Other Poems, by Lola Ridge
+#2 in our series by Lola Ridge
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+Title: The Ghetto and Other Poems
+
+Author: Lola Ridge
+
+Release Date: August, 2003 [Etext# 4332]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on January 8, 2002]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Ghetto and Other Poems, by Lola Ridge
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+
+The Ghetto
+Lola Ridge
+
+TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
+
+Will you feast with me, American People?
+But what have I that shall seem good to you!
+
+On my board are bitter apples
+And honey served on thorns,
+And in my flagons fluid iron,
+Hot from the crucibles.
+
+How should such fare entice you!
+
+CONTENTS
+
+The Ghetto
+Manhattan
+Broadway
+Flotsam
+Spring
+Bowery Afternoon
+Promenade
+The Fog
+Faces
+Debris
+Dedication
+The Song of Iron
+Frank Little at Calvary
+Spires
+The Legion of Iron
+Fuel
+A Toast
+"The Everlasting Return,"
+Palestine
+The Song
+To the Others
+Babel
+The Fiddler
+Dawn Wind
+North Wind
+The Destroyer
+Lullaby
+The Foundling
+The Woman with Jewels
+Submerged
+Art and Life
+Brooklyn Bridge
+Dreams
+The Fire
+A Memory
+The Edge
+The Garden
+Under-Song
+A Worn Rose
+Iron Wine
+Dispossessed
+The Star
+The Tidings
+
+The larger part of the poem entitled "The Ghetto" appeared originally in
+THE NEW REPUBLIC and some of poems were printed in THE INTERNATIONAL,
+OTHERS, POETRY, etc.  To the editors who first published the poems the author
+makes due acknowledgment.
+
+THE GHETTO
+
+I
+
+Cool, inaccessible air
+Is floating in velvety blackness shot with steel-blue lights,
+But no breath stirs the heat
+Leaning its ponderous bulk upon the Ghetto
+And most on Hester street...
+
+The heat...
+Nosing in the body's overflow,
+Like a beast pressing its great steaming belly close,
+Covering all avenues of air...
+
+The heat in Hester street,
+Heaped like a dray
+With the garbage of the world.
+
+Bodies dangle from the fire escapes
+Or sprawl over the stoops...
+Upturned faces glimmer pallidly--
+Herring-yellow faces, spotted as with a mold,
+And moist faces of girls
+Like dank white lilies,
+And infants' faces with open parched mouths that suck at the air
+     as at empty teats.
+
+Young women pass in groups,
+Converging to the forums and meeting halls,
+Surging indomitable, slow
+Through the gross underbrush of heat.
+Their heads are uncovered to the stars,
+And they call to the young men and to one another
+With a free camaraderie.
+Only their eyes are ancient and alone...
+
+The street crawls undulant,
+Like a river addled
+With its hot tide of flesh
+That ever thickens.
+Heavy surges of flesh
+Break over the pavements,
+Clavering like a surf--
+Flesh of this abiding
+Brood of those ancient mothers who saw the dawn break over Egypt...
+And turned their cakes upon the dry hot stones
+And went on
+Till the gold of the Egyptians fell down off their arms...
+Fasting and athirst...
+And yet on...
+
+Did they vision--with those eyes darkly clear,
+That looked the sun in the face and were not blinded--
+Across the centuries
+The march of their enduring flesh?
+Did they hear--
+Under the molten silence
+Of the desert like a stopped wheel--
+(And the scorpions tick-ticking on the sand...)
+The infinite procession of those feet?
+
+II
+
+I room at Sodos'--in the little green room that was Bennie's--
+With Sadie
+And her old father and her mother,
+Who is not so old and wears her own hair.
+
+Old Sodos no longer makes saddles.
+He has forgotten how.
+He has forgotten most things--even Bennie who stays away
+     and sends wine on holidays--
+And he does not like Sadie's mother
+Who hides God's candles,
+Nor Sadie
+Whose young pagan breath puts out the light--
+That should burn always,
+Like Aaron's before the Lord.
+
+Time spins like a crazy dial in his brain,
+And night by night
+I see the love-gesture of his arm
+In its green-greasy coat-sleeve
+Circling the Book,
+And the candles gleaming starkly
+On the blotched-paper whiteness of his face,
+Like a miswritten psalm...
+Night by night
+I hear his lifted praise,
+Like a broken whinnying
+Before the Lord's shut gate.
+
+Sadie dresses in black.
+She has black-wet hair full of cold lights
+And a fine-drawn face, too white.
+All day the power machines
+Drone in her ears...
+All day the fine dust flies
+Till throats are parched and itch
+And the heat--like a kept corpse--
+Fouls to the last corner.
+
+Then--when needles move more slowly on the cloth
+And sweaty fingers slacken
+And hair falls in damp wisps over the eyes--
+Sped by some power within,
+Sadie quivers like a rod...
+A thin black piston flying,
+One with her machine.
+
+She--who stabs the piece-work with her bitter eye
+And bids the girls: "Slow down--
+You'll have him cutting us again!"
+She--fiery static atom,
+Held in place by the fierce pressure all about--
+Speeds up the driven wheels
+And biting steel--that twice
+Has nipped her to the bone.
+
+Nights, she reads
+Those books that have most unset thought,
+New-poured and malleable,
+To which her thought
+Leaps fusing at white heat,
+Or spits her fire out in some dim manger of a hall,
+Or at a protest meeting on the Square,
+Her lit eyes kindling the mob...
+Or dances madly at a festival.
+Each dawn finds her a little whiter,
+Though up and keyed to the long day,
+Alert, yet weary... like a bird
+That all night long has beat about a light.
+
+The Gentile lover, that she charms and shrews,
+Is one more pebble in the pack
+For Sadie's mother,
+Who greets him with her narrowed eyes
+That hold some welcome back.
+"What's to be done?" she'll say,
+"When Sadie wants she takes...
+Better than Bennie with his Christian woman...
+A man is not so like,
+If they should fight,
+To call her Jew..."
+
+Yet when she lies in bed
+And the soft babble of their talk comes to her
+And the silences...
+I know she never sleeps
+Till the keen draught blowing up the empty hall
+Edges through her transom
+And she hears his foot on the first stairs.
+
+Sarah and Anna live on the floor above.
+Sarah is swarthy and ill-dressed.
+Life for her has no ritual.
+She would break an ideal like an egg for the winged thing at the core.
+Her mind is hard and brilliant and cutting like an acetylene torch.
+If any impurities drift there, they must be burnt up as in a clear flame.
+It is droll that she should work in a pants factory.
+--Yet where else... tousled and collar awry at her olive throat.
+Besides her hands are unkempt.
+With English... and everything... there is so little time.
+She reads without bias--
+Doubting clamorously--
+Psychology, plays, science, philosophies--
+Those giant flowers that have bloomed and withered, scattering their seed...
+--And out of this young forcing soil what growth may come--
+     what amazing blossomings.
+
+Anna is different.
+One is always aware of Anna, and the young men turn their heads
+     to look at her.
+She has the appeal of a folk-song
+And her cheap clothes are always in rhythm.
+When the strike was on she gave half her pay.
+She would give anything--save the praise that is hers
+And the love of her lyric body.
+
+But Sarah's desire covets nothing apart.
+She would share all things...
+Even her lover.
+
+III
+
+The sturdy Ghetto children
+March by the parade,
+Waving their toy flags,
+Prancing to the bugles--
+Lusty, unafraid...
+Shaking little fire sticks
+At the night--
+The old blinking night--
+Swerving out of the way,
+Wrapped in her darkness like a shawl.
+
+But a small girl
+Cowers apart.
+Her braided head,
+Shiny as a black-bird's
+In the gleam of the torch-light,
+Is poised as for flight.
+Her eyes have the glow
+Of darkened lights.
+
+She stammers in Yiddish,
+But I do not understand,
+And there flits across her face
+A shadow
+As of a drawn blind.
+I give her an orange,
+Large and golden,
+And she looks at it blankly.
+I take her little cold hand and try to draw her to me,
+But she is stiff...
+Like a doll...
+
+Suddenly she darts through the crowd
+Like a little white panic
+Blown along the night--
+Away from the terror of oncoming feet...
+And drums rattling like curses in red roaring mouths...
+And torches spluttering silver fire
+And lights that nose out hiding-places...
+To the night--
+Squatting like a hunchback
+Under the curved stoop--
+The old mammy-night
+That has outlived beauty and knows the ways of fear--
+The night--wide-opening crooked and comforting arms,
+Hiding her as in a voluminous skirt.
+
+The sturdy Ghetto children
+March by the parade,
+Waving their toy flags,
+Prancing to the bugles,
+Lusty, unafraid.
+But I see a white frock
+And eyes like hooded lights
+Out of the shadow of pogroms
+Watching... watching...
+
+IV
+
+Calicoes and furs,
+Pocket-books and scarfs,
+Razor strops and knives
+(Patterns in check...)
+
+Olive hands and russet head,
+Pickles red and coppery,
+Green pickles, brown pickles,
+(Patterns in tapestry...)
+
+Coral beads, blue beads,
+Beads of pearl and amber,
+Gewgaws, beauty pins--
+Bijoutry for chits--
+Darting rays of violet,
+Amethyst and jade...
+All the colors out to play,
+Jumbled iridescently...
+(Patterns in stained glass
+Shivered into bits!)
+
+Nooses of gay ribbon
+Tugging at one's sleeve,
+Dainty little garters
+Hanging out their sign...
+Here a pout of frilly things--
+There a sonsy feather...
+(White beards, black beards
+Like knots in the weave...)
+
+And ah, the little babies--
+Shiny black-eyed babies--
+(Half a million pink toes
+Wriggling altogether.)
+Baskets full of babies
+Like grapes on a vine.
+
+Mothers waddling in and out,
+Making all things right--
+Picking up the slipped threads
+In Grand street at night--
+Grand street like a great bazaar,
+Crowded like a float,
+Bulging like a crazy quilt
+Stretched on a line.
+
+But nearer seen
+This litter of the East
+Takes on a garbled majesty.
+
+The herded stalls
+In dissolute array...
+The glitter and the jumbled finery
+And strangely juxtaposed
+Cans, paper, rags
+And colors decomposing,
+Faded like old hair,
+With flashes of barbaric hues
+And eyes of mystery...
+Flung
+Like an ancient tapestry of motley weave
+Upon the open wall of this new land.
+
+Here, a tawny-headed girl...
+Lemons in a greenish broth
+And a huge earthen bowl
+By a bronzed merchant
+With a tall black lamb's wool cap upon his head...
+He has no glance for her.
+His thrifty eyes
+Bend--glittering, intent
+Their hoarded looks
+Upon his merchandise,
+As though it were some splendid cloth
+Or sumptuous raiment
+Stitched in gold and red...
+
+He seldom talks
+Save of the goods he spreads--
+The meager cotton with its dismal flower--
+But with his skinny hands
+That hover like two hawks
+Above some luscious meat,
+He fingers lovingly each calico,
+As though it were a gorgeous shawl,
+Or costly vesture
+Wrought in silken thread,
+Or strange bright carpet
+Made for sandaled feet...
+
+Here an old grey scholar stands.
+His brooding eyes--
+That hold long vistas without end
+Of caravans and trees and roads,
+And cities dwindling in remembrance--
+Bend mostly on his tapes and thread.
+
+What if they tweak his beard--
+These raw young seed of Israel
+Who have no backward vision in their eyes--
+And mock him as he sways
+Above the sunken arches of his feet--
+They find no peg to hang their taunts upon.
+His soul is like a rock
+That bears a front worn smooth
+By the coarse friction of the sea,
+And, unperturbed, he keeps his bitter peace.
+
+What if a rigid arm and stuffed blue shape,
+Backed by a nickel star
+Does prod him on,
+Taking his proud patience for humility...
+All gutters are as one
+To that old race that has been thrust
+From off the curbstones of the world...
+And he smiles with the pale irony
+Of one who holds
+The wisdom of the Talmud stored away
+In his mind's lavender.
+
+But this young trader,
+Born to trade as to a caul,
+Peddles the notions of the hour.
+The gestures of the craft are his
+And all the lore
+As when to hold, withdraw, persuade, advance...
+And be it gum or flags,
+Or clean-all or the newest thing in tags,
+Demand goes to him as the bee to flower.
+And he--appraising
+All who come and go
+With his amazing
+Slight-of-mind and glance
+And nimble thought
+And nature balanced like the scales at nought--
+Looks Westward where the trade-lights glow,
+And sees his vision rise--
+A tape-ruled vision,
+Circumscribed in stone--
+Some fifty stories to the skies.
+
+V
+
+As I sit in my little fifth-floor room--
+Bare,
+Save for bed and chair,
+And coppery stains
+Left by seeping rains
+On the low ceiling
+And green plaster walls,
+Where when night falls
+Golden lady-bugs
+Come out of their holes,
+And roaches, sepia-brown, consort...
+I hear bells pealing
+Out of the gray church at Rutgers street,
+Holding its high-flung cross above the Ghetto,
+And, one floor down across the court,
+The parrot screaming:
+Vorwärts... Vorwärts...
+
+The parrot frowsy-white,
+Everlastingly swinging
+On its iron bar.
+
+A little old woman,
+With a wig of smooth black hair
+Gummed about her shrunken brows,
+Comes sometimes on the fire escape.
+An old stooped mother,
+The left shoulder low
+With that uneven droopiness that women know
+Who have suckled many young...
+Yet I have seen no other than the parrot there.
+
+I watch her mornings as she shakes her rugs
+Feebly, with futile reach
+And fingers without clutch.
+Her thews are slack
+And curved the ruined back
+And flesh empurpled like old meat,
+Yet each conspires
+To feed those guttering fires
+With which her eyes are quick.
+
+On Friday nights
+Her candles signal
+Infinite fine rays
+To other windows,
+Coupling other lights,
+Linking the tenements
+Like an endless prayer.
+
+She seems less lonely than the bird
+That day by day about the dismal house
+Screams out his frenzied word...
+That night by night--
+If a dog yelps
+Or a cat yawls
+Or a sick child whines,
+Or a door screaks on its hinges,
+Or a man and woman fight--
+Sends his cry above the huddled roofs:
+Vorwärts... Vorwärts...
+
+VI
+
+In this dingy cafe
+The old men sit muffled in woollens.
+Everything is faded, shabby, colorless, old...
+The chairs, loose-jointed,
+Creaking like old bones--
+The tables, the waiters, the walls,
+Whose mottled plaster
+Blends in one tone with the old flesh.
+
+Young life and young thought are alike barred,
+And no unheralded noises jolt old nerves,
+And old wheezy breaths
+Pass around old thoughts, dry as snuff,
+And there is no divergence and no friction
+Because life is flattened and ground as by many mills.
+
+And it is here the Committee--
+Sweet-breathed and smooth of skin
+And supple of spine and knee,
+With shining unpouched eyes
+And the blood, high-powered,
+Leaping in flexible arteries--
+The insolent, young, enthusiastic, undiscriminating Committee,
+Who would placard tombstones
+And scatter leaflets even in graves,
+Comes trampling with sacrilegious feet!
+
+The old men turn stiffly,
+Mumbling to each other.
+They are gentle and torpid and busy with eating.
+But one lifts a face of clayish pallor,
+There is a dull fury in his eyes, like little rusty grates.
+He rises slowly,
+Trembling in his many swathings like an awakened mummy,
+Ridiculous yet terrible.
+--And the Committee flings him a waste glance,
+Dropping a leaflet by his plate.
+
+A lone fire flickers in the dusty eyes.
+The lips chant inaudibly.
+The warped shrunken body straightens like a tree.
+And he curses...
+With uplifted arms and perished fingers,
+Claw-like, clutching...
+So centuries ago
+The old men cursed Acosta,
+When they, prophetic, heard upon their sepulchres
+Those feet that may not halt nor turn aside for ancient things.
+
+VII
+
+Here in this room, bare like a barn,
+Egos gesture one to the other--
+Naked, unformed, unwinged
+Egos out of the shell,
+Examining, searching, devouring--
+Avid alike for the flower or the dung...
+(Having no dainty antennae for the touch and withdrawal--
+Only the open maw...)
+
+Egos cawing,
+Expanding in the mean egg...
+Little squat tailors with unkempt faces,
+Pale as lard,
+Fur-makers, factory-hands, shop-workers,
+News-boys with battling eyes
+And bodies yet vibrant with the momentum of long runs,
+Here and there a woman...
+
+Words, words, words,
+Pattering like hail,
+Like hail falling without aim...
+Egos rampant,
+Screaming each other down.
+One motions perpetually,
+Waving arms like overgrowths.
+He has burning eyes and a cough
+And a thin voice piping
+Like a flute among trombones.
+
+One, red-bearded, rearing
+A welter of maimed face bashed in from some old wound,
+Garbles Max Stirner.
+His words knock each other like little wooden blocks.
+No one heeds him,
+And a lank boy with hair over his eyes
+Pounds upon the table.
+--He is chairman.
+
+Egos yet in the primer,
+Hearing world-voices
+Chanting grand arias...
+Majors resonant,
+Stunning with sound...
+Baffling minors
+Half-heard like rain on pools...
+Majestic discordances
+Greater than harmonies...
+--Gleaning out of it all
+Passion, bewilderment, pain...
+
+Egos yearning with the world-old want in their eyes--
+Hurt hot eyes that do not sleep enough...
+Striving with infinite effort,
+Frustrate yet ever pursuing
+The great white Liberty,
+Trailing her dissolving glory over each hard-won barricade--
+Only to fade anew...
+
+Egos crying out of unkempt deeps
+And waving their dreams like flags--
+Multi-colored dreams,
+Winged and glorious...
+
+A gas jet throws a stunted flame,
+Vaguely illumining the groping faces.
+And through the uncurtained window
+Falls the waste light of stars,
+As cold as wise men's eyes...
+Indifferent great stars,
+Fortuitously glancing
+At the secret meeting in this shut-in room,
+Bare as a manger.
+
+VIII
+
+Lights go out
+And the stark trunks of the factories
+Melt into the drawn darkness,
+Sheathing like a seamless garment.
+
+And mothers take home their babies,
+Waxen and delicately curled,
+Like little potted flowers closed under the stars.
+
+Lights go out
+And the young men shut their eyes,
+But life turns in them...
+
+Life in the cramped ova
+Tearing and rending asunder its living cells...
+Wars, arts, discoveries, rebellions, travails, immolations,
+     cataclysms, hates...
+Pent in the shut flesh.
+And the young men twist on their beds in languor and dizziness
+     unsupportable...
+Their eyes--heavy and dimmed
+With dust of long oblivions in the gray pulp behind--
+Staring as through a choked glass.
+And they gaze at the moon--throwing off a faint heat--
+The moon, blond and burning, creeping to their cots
+Softly, as on naked feet...
+Lolling on the coverlet... like a woman offering her white body.
+
+Nude glory of the moon!
+That leaps like an athlete on the bosoms of the young girls stripped
+     of their linens;
+Stroking their breasts that are smooth and cool as mother-of-pearl
+Till the nipples tingle and burn as though little lips plucked at them.
+They shudder and grow faint.
+And their ears are filled as with a delirious rhapsody,
+That Life, like a drunken player,
+Strikes out of their clear white bodies
+As out of ivory keys.
+
+Lights go out...
+And the great lovers linger in little groups, still passionately debating,
+Or one may walk in silence, listening only to the still summons of Life--
+Life making the great Demand...
+Calling its new Christs...
+Till tears come, blurring the stars
+That grow tender and comforting like the eyes of comrades;
+And the moon rolls behind the Battery
+Like a word molten out of the mouth of God.
+
+Lights go out...
+And colors rush together,
+Fusing and floating away...
+Pale worn gold like the settings of old jewels...
+Mauves, exquisite, tremulous, and luminous purples
+And burning spires in aureoles of light
+Like shimmering auras.
+
+They are covering up the pushcarts...
+Now all have gone save an old man with mirrors--
+Little oval mirrors like tiny pools.
+He shuffles up a darkened street
+And the moon burnishes his mirrors till they shine like phosphorus...
+The moon like a skull,
+Staring out of eyeless sockets at the old men trundling home the pushcarts.
+
+IX
+
+A sallow dawn is in the sky
+As I enter my little green room.
+Sadie's light is still burning...
+Without, the frail moon
+Worn to a silvery tissue,
+Throws a faint glamour on the roofs,
+And down the shadowy spires
+Lights tip-toe out...
+Softly as when lovers close street doors.
+
+Out of the Battery
+A little wind
+Stirs idly--as an arm
+Trails over a boat's side in dalliance--
+Rippling the smooth dead surface of the heat,
+And Hester street,
+Like a forlorn woman over-born
+By many babies at her teats,
+Turns on her trampled bed to meet the day.
+
+LIFE!
+Startling, vigorous life,
+That squirms under my touch,
+And baffles me when I try to examine it,
+Or hurls me back without apology.
+Leaving my ego ruffled and preening itself.
+
+Life,
+Articulate, shrill,
+Screaming in provocative assertion,
+Or out of the black and clotted gutters,
+Piping in silvery thin
+Sweet staccato
+Of children's laughter,
+
+Or clinging over the pushcarts
+Like a litter of tiny bells
+Or the jingle of silver coins,
+Perpetually changing hands,
+Or like the Jordan somberly
+Swirling in tumultuous uncharted tides,
+Surface-calm.
+
+Electric currents of life,
+Throwing off thoughts like sparks,
+Glittering, disappearing,
+Making unknown circuits,
+Or out of spent particles stirring
+Feeble contortions in old faiths
+Passing before the new.
+
+Long nights argued away
+In meeting halls
+Back of interminable stairways--
+In Roumanian wine-shops
+And little Russian tea-rooms...
+
+Feet echoing through deserted streets
+In the soft darkness before dawn...
+Brows aching, throbbing, burning--
+Life leaping in the shaken flesh
+Like flame at an asbestos curtain.
+
+Life--
+Pent, overflowing
+Stoops and façades,
+Jostling, pushing, contriving,
+Seething as in a great vat...
+
+Bartering, changing, extorting,
+Dreaming, debating, aspiring,
+Astounding, indestructible
+Life of the Ghetto...
+
+Strong flux of life,
+Like a bitter wine
+Out of the bloody stills of the world...
+Out of the Passion eternal.
+
+
+MANHATTAN LIGHTS
+
+MANHATTAN
+
+Out of the night you burn, Manhattan,
+In a vesture of gold--
+Span of innumerable arcs,
+Flaring and multiplying--
+Gold at the uttermost circles fading
+Into the tenderest hint of jade,
+Or fusing in tremulous twilight blues,
+Robing the far-flung offices,
+Scintillant-storied, forking flame,
+Or soaring to luminous amethyst
+Over the steeples aureoled--
+
+Diaphanous gold,
+Veiling the Woolworth, argently
+Rising slender and stark
+Mellifluous-shrill as a vender's cry,
+And towers squatting graven and cold
+On the velvet bales of the dark,
+And the Singer's appraising
+Indolent idol's eye,
+And night like a purple cloth unrolled--
+
+Nebulous gold
+Throwing an ephemeral glory about life's vanishing points,
+Wherein you burn...
+You of unknown voltage
+Whirling on your axis...
+Scrawling vermillion signatures
+Over the night's velvet hoarding...
+Insolent, towering spherical
+To apices ever shifting.
+
+BROADWAY
+
+Light!
+Innumerable ions of light,
+Kindling, irradiating,
+All to their foci tending...
+
+Light that jingles like anklet chains
+On bevies of little lithe twinkling feet,
+Or clingles in myriad vibrations
+Like trillions of porcelain
+Vases shattering...
+
+Light over the laminae of roofs,
+Diffusing in shimmering nebulae
+About the night's boundaries,
+Or billowing in pearly foam
+Submerging the low-lying stars...
+
+Light for the feast prolonged--
+Captive light in the goblets quivering...
+Sparks evanescent
+Struck of meeting looks--
+Fringed eyelids leashing
+Sheathed and leaping lights...
+Infinite bubbles of light
+Bursting, reforming...
+Silvery filings of light
+Incessantly falling...
+Scintillant, sided dust of light
+Out of the white flares of Broadway--
+Like a great spurious diamond
+In the night's corsage faceted...
+
+Broadway,
+In ambuscades of light,
+Drawing the charmed multitudes
+With the slow suction of her breath--
+Dangling her naked soul
+Behind the blinding gold of eunuch lights
+That wind about her like a bodyguard.
+
+Or like a huge serpent, iridescent-scaled,
+Trailing her coruscating length
+Over the night prostrate--
+Triumphant poised,
+Her hydra heads above the avenues,
+Values appraising
+And her avid eyes
+Glistening with eternal watchfulness...
+
+Broadway--
+Out of her towers rampant,
+Like an unsubtle courtezan
+Reserving nought for some adventurous night.
+
+FLOTSAM
+
+Crass rays streaming from the vestibules;
+Cafes glittering like jeweled teeth;
+High-flung signs
+Blinking yellow phosphorescent eyes;
+Girls in black
+Circling monotonously
+About the orange lights...
+
+Nothing to guess at...
+Save the darkness above
+Crouching like a great cat.
+
+In the dim-lit square,
+Where dishevelled trees
+Tustle with the wind--the wind like a scythe
+Mowing their last leaves--
+Arcs shimmering through a greenish haze--
+Pale oval arcs
+Like ailing virgins,
+Each out of a halo circumscribed,
+Pallidly staring...
+
+Figures drift upon the benches
+With no more rustle than a dropped leaf settling--
+Slovenly figures like untied parcels,
+And papers wrapped about their knees
+Huddled one to the other,
+Cringing to the wind--
+The sided wind,
+Leaving no breach untried...
+
+So many and all so still...
+The fountain slobbering its stone basin
+Is louder than They--
+Flotsam of the five oceans
+Here on this raft of the world.
+
+This old man's head
+Has found a woman's shoulder.
+The wind juggles with her shawl
+That flaps about them like a sail,
+And splashes her red faded hair
+Over the salt stubble of his chin.
+A light foam is on his lips,
+As though dreams surged in him
+Breaking and ebbing away...
+And the bare boughs shuffle above him
+And the twigs rattle like dice...
+
+She--diffused like a broken beetle--
+Sprawls without grace,
+Her face gray as asphalt,
+Her jaws sagging as on loosened hinges...
+Shadows ply about her mouth--
+Nimble shadows out of the jigging tree,
+That dances above her its dance of dry bones.
+
+II
+
+A uniformed front,
+Paunched;
+A glance like a blow,
+The swing of an arm,
+Verved, vigorous;
+Boot-heels clanking
+In metallic rhythm;
+The blows of a baton,
+Quick, staccato...
+
+--There is a rustling along the benches
+As of dried leaves raked over...
+And the old man lifts a shaking palsied hand,
+Tucking the displaced paper about his knees.
+
+Colder...
+And a frost under foot,
+Acid, corroding,
+Eating through worn bootsoles.
+
+Drab forms blur into greenish vapor.
+Through boughs like cross-bones,
+Pale arcs flare and shiver
+Like lilies in a wind.
+
+High over Broadway
+A far-flung sign
+Glitters in indigo darkness
+And spurts again rhythmically,
+Spraying great drops
+Red as a hemorrhage.
+
+SPRING
+
+A spring wind on the Bowery,
+Blowing the fluff of night shelters
+Off bedraggled garments,
+And agitating the gutters, that eject little spirals of vapor
+Like lewd growths.
+
+Bare-legged children stamp in the puddles, splashing each other,
+One--with a choir-boy's face
+Twits me as I pass...
+The word, like a muddied drop,
+Seems to roll over and not out of
+The bowed lips,
+Yet dewy red
+And sweetly immature.
+
+People sniff the air with an upward look--
+Even the mite of a girl
+Who never plays...
+Her mother smiles at her
+With eyes like vacant lots
+Rimming vistas of mean streets
+And endless washing days...
+Yet with sun on the lines
+And a drying breeze.
+
+The old candy woman
+Shivers in the young wind.
+Her eyes--littered with memories
+Like ancient garrets,
+Or dusty unaired rooms where someone died--
+Ask nothing of the spring.
+
+But a pale pink dream
+Trembles about this young girl's body,
+Draping it like a glowing aura.
+
+She gloats in a mirror
+Over her gaudy hat,
+With its flower God never thought of...
+
+And the dream, unrestrained,
+Floats about the loins of a soldier,
+Where it quivers a moment,
+Warming to a crimson
+Like the scarf of a toreador...
+
+But the delicate gossamer breaks at his contact
+And recoils to her in strands of shattered rose.
+
+BOWERY AFTERNOON
+
+Drab discoloration
+Of faces, façades, pawn-shops,
+Second-hand clothing,
+Smoky and fly-blown glass of lunch-rooms,
+Odors of rancid life...
+
+Deadly uniformity
+Of eyes and windows
+Alike devoid of light...
+Holes wherein life scratches--
+Mangy life
+Nosing to the gutter's end...
+
+Show-rooms and mimic pillars
+Flaunting out of their gaudy vestibules
+Bosoms and posturing thighs...
+
+Over all the Elevated
+Droning like a bloated fly.
+
+PROMENADE
+
+     Undulant rustlings,
+     Of oncoming silk,
+     Rhythmic, incessant,
+     Like the motion of leaves...
+     Fragments of color
+     In glowing surprises...
+     Pink inuendoes
+     Hooded in gray
+     Like buds in a cobweb
+     Pearled at dawn...
+     Glimpses of green
+     And blurs of gold
+     And delicate mauves
+     That snatch at youth...
+     And bodies all rosily
+     Fleshed for the airing,
+     In warm velvety surges
+     Passing imperious, slow...
+
+Women drift into the limousines
+That shut like silken caskets
+On gems half weary of their glittering...
+Lamps open like pale moon flowers...
+Arcs are radiant opals
+Strewn along the dusk...
+No common lights invade.
+And spires rise like litanies--
+Magnificats of stone
+Over the white silence of the arcs,
+Burning in perpetual adoration.
+
+THE FOG
+
+Out of the lamp-bestarred and clouded dusk--
+Snaring, illuding, concealing,
+Magically conjuring--
+Turning to fairy-coaches
+Beetle-backed limousines
+Scampering under the great Arch--
+Making a decoy of blue overalls
+And mystery of a scarlet shawl--
+Indolently--
+Knowing no impediment of its sure advance--
+Descends the fog.
+
+FACES
+
+A late snow beats
+With cold white fists upon the tenements--
+Hurriedly drawing blinds and shutters,
+Like tall old slatterns
+Pulling aprons about their heads.
+
+Lights slanting out of Mott Street
+Gibber out,
+Or dribble through bar-room slits,
+Anonymous shapes
+Conniving behind shuttered panes
+Caper and disappear...
+Where the Bowery
+Is throbbing like a fistula
+Back of her ice-scabbed fronts.
+
+Livid faces
+Glimmer in furtive doorways,
+Or spill out of the black pockets of alleys,
+Smears of faces like muddied beads,
+Making a ghastly rosary
+The night mumbles over
+And the snow with its devilish and silken whisper...
+Patrolling arcs
+Blowing shrill blasts over the Bread Line
+Stalk them as they pass,
+Silent as though accouched of the darkness,
+And the wind noses among them,
+     Like a skunk
+That roots about the heart...
+
+Colder:
+And the Elevated slams upon the silence
+Like a ponderous door.
+Then all is still again,
+Save for the wind fumbling over
+The emptily swaying faces--
+The wind rummaging
+Like an old Jew...
+
+Faces in glimmering rows...
+(No sign of the abject life--
+Not even a blasphemy...)
+But the spindle legs keep time
+To a limping rhythm,
+And the shadows twitch upon the snow
+     Convulsively--
+As though death played
+With some ungainly dolls.
+
+
+LABOR
+
+DEBRIS
+
+I love those spirits
+That men stand off and point at,
+Or shudder and hood up their souls--
+Those ruined ones,
+Where Liberty has lodged an hour
+And passed like flame,
+Bursting asunder the too small house.
+
+DEDICATION
+
+I would be a torch unto your hand,
+A lamp upon your forehead, Labor,
+In the wild darkness before the Dawn
+That I shall never see...
+
+We shall advance together, my Beloved,
+Awaiting the mighty ushering...
+Together we shall make the last grand charge
+And ride with gorgeous Death
+With all her spangles on
+And cymbals clashing...
+And you shall rush on exultant as I fall--
+Scattering a brief fire about your feet...
+
+Let it be so...
+Better--while life is quick
+And every pain immense and joy supreme,
+And all I have and am
+Flames upward to the dream...
+Than like a taper forgotten in the dawn,
+Burning out the wick.
+
+THE SONG OF IRON
+
+I
+
+Not yet hast Thou sounded
+Thy clangorous music,
+Whose strings are under the mountains...
+Not yet hast Thou spoken
+The blooded, implacable Word...
+
+But I hear in the Iron singing--
+In the triumphant roaring of the steam and pistons pounding--
+Thy barbaric exhortation...
+And the blood leaps in my arteries, unreproved,
+Answering Thy call...
+All my spirit is inundated with the tumultuous passion of Thy Voice,
+And sings exultant with the Iron,
+For now I know I too am of Thy Chosen...
+
+Oh fashioned in fire--
+Needing flame for Thy ultimate word--
+Behold me, a cupola
+Poured to Thy use!
+
+Heed not my tremulous body
+That faints in the grip of Thy gauntlet.
+Break it... and cast it aside...
+But make of my spirit
+That dares and endures
+Thy crucible...
+Pour through my soul
+Thy molten, world-whelming song.
+
+... Here at Thy uttermost gate
+Like a new Mary, I wait...
+
+II
+
+Charge the blast furnace, workman...
+Open the valves--
+Drive the fires high...
+(Night is above the gates).
+
+How golden-hot the ore is
+From the cupola spurting,
+Tossing the flaming petals
+Over the silt and furnace ash--
+Blown leaves, devastating,
+Falling about the world...
+
+Out of the furnace mouth--
+Out of the giant mouth--
+The raging, turgid, mouth--
+Fall fiery blossoms
+Gold with the gold of buttercups
+In a field at sunset,
+Or huskier gold of dandelions,
+Warmed in sun-leavings,
+Or changing to the paler hue
+At the creamy hearts of primroses.
+
+Charge the converter, workman--
+Tired from the long night?
+But the earth shall suck up darkness--
+The earth that holds so much...
+And out of these molten flowers,
+Shall shape the heavy fruit...
+
+Then open the valves--
+Drive the fires high,
+Your blossoms nurturing.
+(Day is at the gates
+And a young wind...)
+
+Put by your rod, comrade,
+And look with me, shading your eyes...
+Do you not see--
+Through the lucent haze
+Out of the converter rising--
+In the spirals of fire
+Smiting and blinding,
+A shadowy shape
+White as a flame of sacrifice,
+Like a lily swaying?
+
+III
+
+The ore leaping in the crucibles,
+The ore communicant,
+Sending faint thrills along the leads...
+Fire is running along the roots of the mountains...
+I feel the long recoil of earth
+As under a mighty quickening...
+(Dawn is aglow in the light of the Iron...)
+All palpitant, I wait...
+
+
+IV
+
+Here ye, Dictators--late Lords of the Iron,
+Shut in your council rooms, palsied, depowered--
+The blooded, implacable Word?
+Not whispered in cloture, one to the other,
+(Brother in fear of the fear of his brother...)
+But chanted and thundered
+On the brazen, articulate tongues of the Iron
+Babbling in flame...
+
+Sung to the rhythm of prisons dismantled,
+Manacles riven and ramparts defaced...
+(Hearts death-anointed yet hearing life calling...)
+Ankle chains bursting and gallows unbraced...
+
+Sung to the rhythm of arsenals burning...
+Clangor of iron smashing on iron,
+Turmoil of metal and dissonant baying
+Of mail-sided monsters shattered asunder...
+
+Hulks of black turbines all mangled and roaring,
+Battering egress through ramparted walls...
+Mouthing of engines, made rabid with power,
+Into the holocaust snorting and plunging...
+
+Mighty converters torn from their axis,
+Flung to the furnaces, vomiting fire,
+Jumbled in white-heaten masses disshapen...
+Writhing in flame-tortured levers of iron...
+
+Gnashing of steel serpents twisting and dying...
+Screeching of steam-glutted cauldrons rending...
+Shock of leviathans prone on each other...
+Scaled flanks touching, ore entering ore...
+Steel haunches closing and grappling and swaying
+In the waltz of the mating locked mammoths of iron,
+Tasting the turbulent fury of living,
+Mad with a moment's exuberant living!
+Crash of devastating hammers despoiling..
+Hands inexorable, marring
+What hands had so cunningly moulded...
+
+Structures of steel welded, subtily tempered,
+Marvelous wrought of the wizards of ore,
+Torn into octaves discordantly clashing,
+Chords never final but onward progressing
+In monstrous fusion of sound ever smiting on sound
+     in mad vortices whirling...
+
+Till the ear, tortured, shrieks for cessation
+Of the raving inharmonies hatefully mingling...
+The fierce obligato the steel pipes are screaming...
+The blare of the rude molten music of Iron...
+
+FRANK LITTLE AT CALVARY
+
+I
+
+He walked under the shadow of the Hill
+Where men are fed into the fires
+And walled apart...
+Unarmed and alone,
+He summoned his mates from the pit's mouth
+Where tools rested on the floors
+And great cranes swung
+Unemptied, on the iron girders.
+And they, who were the Lords of the Hill,
+Were seized with a great fear,
+When they heard out of the silence of wheels
+The answer ringing
+In endless reverberations
+Under the mountain...
+
+So they covered up their faces
+And crept upon him as he slept...
+Out of eye-holes in black cloth
+They looked upon him who had flung
+Between them and their ancient prey
+The frail barricade of his life...
+And when night--that has connived at so much--
+Was heavy with the unborn day,
+They haled him from his bed...
+
+Who might know of that wild ride?
+Only the bleak Hill--
+The red Hill, vigilant,
+Like a blood-shot eye
+In the black mask of night--
+Dared watch them as they raced
+By each blind-folded street
+Godiva might have ridden down...
+But when they stopped beside the Place,
+I know he turned his face
+Wistfully to the accessory night...
+
+And when he saw--against the sky,
+Sagged like a silken net
+Under its load of stars--
+The black bridge poised
+Like a gigantic spider motionless...
+I know there was a silence in his heart,
+As of a frozen sea,
+Where some half lifted arm, mid-way
+Wavers, and drops heavily...
+
+I know he waved to life,
+And that life signaled back, transcending space,
+To each high-powered sense,
+So that he missed no gesture of the wind
+Drawing the shut leaves close...
+So that he saw the light on comrades' faces
+Of camp fires out of sight...
+And the savor of meat and bread
+Blew in his nostrils... and the breath
+Of unrailed spaces
+Where shut wild clover smelled as sweet
+As a virgin in her bed.
+
+I know he looked once at America,
+Quiescent, with her great flanks on the globe,
+And once at the skies whirling above him...
+Then all that he had spoken against
+And struck against and thrust against
+Over the frail barricade of his life
+Rushed between him and the stars...
+
+II
+
+Life thunders on...
+Over the black bridge
+The line of lighted cars
+Creeps like a monstrous serpent
+Spooring gold...
+
+Watchman, what of the track?
+
+Night... silence... stars...
+All's Well!
+
+III
+
+Light...
+(Breaking mists...
+Hills gliding like hands out of a slipping hold...)
+Light over the pit mouths,
+Streaming in tenuous rays down the black gullets of the Hill...
+(The copper, insensate, sleeping in the buried lode.)
+Light...
+Forcing the clogged windows of arsenals...
+Probing with long sentient fingers in the copper chips...
+Gleaming metallic and cold
+In numberless slivers of steel...
+Light over the trestles and the iron clips
+Of the black bridge--poised like a gigantic spider motionless--
+Sweet inquisition of light, like a child's wonder...
+Intrusive, innocently staring light
+That nothing appals...
+
+Light in the slow fumbling summer leaves,
+Cooing and calling
+All winged and avid things
+Waking the early flies, keen to the scent...
+Green-jeweled iridescent flies
+Unerringly steering--
+Swarming over the blackened lips,
+The young day sprays with indiscriminate gold...
+
+Watchman, what of the Hill?
+
+Wheels turn;
+The laden cars
+Go rumbling to the mill,
+And Labor walks beside the mules...
+All's Well with the Hill!
+
+SPIRES
+
+Spires of Grace Church,
+For you the workers of the world
+Travailed with the mountains...
+Aborting their own dreams
+Till the dream of you arose--
+Beautiful, swaddled in stone--
+Scorning their hands.
+
+THE LEGION OF IRON
+
+They pass through the great iron gates--
+Men with eyes gravely discerning,
+Skilled to appraise the tunnage of cranes
+Or split an inch into thousandths--
+Men tempered by fire as the ore is
+And planned to resistance
+Like steel that has cooled in the trough;
+Silent of purpose, inflexible, set to fulfilment--
+To conquer, withstand, overthrow...
+Men mannered to large undertakings,
+Knowing force as a brother
+And power as something to play with,
+Seeing blood as a slip of the iron,
+To be wiped from the tools
+Lest they rust.
+
+But what if they stood aside,
+Who hold the earth so careless in the crook of their arms?
+
+What of the flamboyant cities
+And the lights guttering out like candles in a wind...
+And the armies halted...
+And the train mid-way on the mountain
+And idle men chaffing across the trenches...
+And the cursing and lamentation
+And the clamor for grain shut in the mills of the world?
+What if they stayed apart,
+Inscrutably smiling,
+Leaving the ground encumbered with dead wire
+And the sea to row-boats
+And the lands marooned--
+Till Time should like a paralytic sit,
+A mildewed hulk above the nations squatting?
+
+FUEL
+
+What of the silence of the keys
+And silvery hands? The iron sings...
+Though bows lie broken on the strings,
+The fly-wheels turn eternally...
+
+Bring fuel--drive the fires high...
+Throw all this artist-lumber in
+And foolish dreams of making things...
+(Ten million men are called to die.)
+
+As for the common men apart,
+Who sweat to keep their common breath,
+And have no hour for books or art--
+What dreams have these to hide from death!
+
+A TOAST
+
+Not your martyrs anointed of heaven--
+     The ages are red where they trod--
+But the Hunted--the world's bitter leaven--
+     Who smote at your imbecile God--
+
+A being to pander and fawn to,
+     To propitiate, flatter and dread
+As a thing that your souls are in pawn to,
+     A Dealer who traffics the dead;
+
+A Trader with greed never sated,
+     Who barters the souls in his snares,
+That were trapped in the lusts he created,
+     For incense and masses and prayers--
+
+They are crushed in the coils of your halters;
+     'Twere well--by the creeds ye have nursed--
+That ye send up a cry from your altars,
+     A mass for the Martyrs Accursed;
+
+A passionate prayer from reprieval
+     For the Brotherhood not understood--
+For the Heroes who died for the evil,
+     Believing the evil was good.
+
+To the Breakers, the Bold, the Despoilers,
+     Who dreamed of a world over-thrown...
+They who died for the millions of toilers--
+     Few--fronting the nations alone!
+
+--To the Outlawed of men and the Branded,
+     Whether hated or hating they fell--
+I pledge the devoted, red-handed,
+     Unfaltering Heroes of Hell!
+
+
+ACCIDENTALS
+
+"THE EVERLASTING RETURN"
+
+It is dark... so dark, I remember the sun on Chios...
+It is still... so still, I hear the beat of our paddles on the Aegean...
+
+Ten times we had watched the moon
+Rise like a thin white virgin out of the waters
+And round into a full maternity...
+For thrice ten moons we had touched no flesh
+Save the man flesh on either hand
+That was black and bitter and salt and scaled by the sea.
+
+The Athenian boy sat on my left...
+His hair was yellow as corn steeped in wine...
+And on my right was Phildar the Carthaginian,
+Grinning Phildar
+With his mouth pulled taut as by reins from his black gapped teeth.
+Many a whip had coiled about him
+And his shoulders were rutted deep as wet ground under chariot wheels,
+And his skin was red and tough as a bull's hide cured in the sun.
+He did not sing like the other slaves,
+But when a big wind came up he screamed with it.
+And always he looked out to sea,
+Save when he tore at his fish ends
+Or spat across me at the Greek boy, whose mouth was red and apart
+     like an opened fruit.
+
+We had rowed from dawn and the green galley hard at our stern.
+She was green and squat and skulked close to the sea.
+All day the tish of their paddles had tickled our ears,
+And when night came on
+And little naked stars dabbled in the water
+And half the crouching moon
+Slid over the silver belly of the sea thick-scaled with light,
+We heard them singing at their oars...
+We who had no breath for song.
+
+There was no sound in our boat
+Save the clingle of wrist chains
+And the sobbing of the young Greek.
+I cursed him that his hair blew in my mouth, tasting salt of the sea...
+I cursed him that his oar kept ill time...
+When he looked at me I cursed him again,
+That his eyes were soft as a woman's.
+
+How long... since their last shell gouged our batteries?
+How long... since we rose at aim with a sleuth moon astern?
+(It was the damned green moon that nosed us out...
+The moon that flushed our periscope till it shone like a silver flame...)
+
+They loosed each man's right hand
+As the galley spent on our decks...
+And amazed and bloodied we reared half up
+And fought askew with the left hand shackled...
+But a zigzag fire leapt in our sockets
+And knotted our thews like string...
+Our thews grown stiff as a crooked spine that would not straighten...
+
+How long... since our gauges fell
+And the sea shoved us under?
+It is dark... so dark...
+Darkness presses hairy-hot
+Where three make crowded company...
+And the rank steel smells....
+It is still... so still...
+I seem to hear the wind
+On the dimpled face of the water fathoms above...
+
+
+It was still... so still... we three that were left alive
+Stared in each other's faces...
+But three make bitter company at one man's bread...
+And our hate grew sharp and bright as the moon's edge in the water.
+
+One grinned with his mouth awry from the long gapped teeth...
+And one shivered and whined like a gull as the waves pawed us over...
+But one struck with his hate in his hand...
+
+After that I remember
+Only the dead men's oars that flapped in the sea...
+The dead men's oars that rattled and clicked like idiots' tongues.
+
+It is still... so still, with the jargon of engines quiet.
+We three awaiting the crunch of the sea
+Reach our hands in the dark and touch each other's faces...
+We three sheathing hate in our hearts...
+But when hate shall have made its circuit,
+Our bones will be loving company
+Here in the sea's den...
+And one whimpers and cries on his God
+And one sits sullenly
+But both draw away from me...
+For I am the pyre their memories burn on...
+Like black flames leaping
+Our fiery gestures light the walled-in darkness of the sea...
+The sea that kneels above us...
+And makes no sign.
+
+PALESTINE
+
+Old plant of Asia--
+Mutilated vine
+Holding earth's leaping sap
+In every stem and shoot
+That lopped off, sprouts again--
+Why should you seek a plateau walled about,
+Whose garden is the world?
+
+THE SONG
+
+That day, in the slipping of torsos and straining flanks
+     on the bloodied ooze of fields plowed by the iron,
+And the smoke bluish near earth and bronze in the sunshine
+     floating like cotton-down,
+And the harsh and terrible screaming,
+And that strange vibration at the roots of us...
+Desire, fierce, like a song...
+And we heard
+(Do you remember?)
+All the Red Cross bands on Fifth avenue
+And bugles in little home towns
+And children's harmonicas bleating
+
+     America!
+
+And after...
+(Do you remember?)
+The drollery of the wind on our faces,
+And horizons reeling,
+And the terror of the plain
+Heaving like a gaunt pelvis to the sun...
+Under us--threshing and twanging
+Torn-up roots of the Song...
+
+TO THE OTHERS
+
+I see you, refulgent ones,
+Burning so steadily
+Like big white arc lights...
+There are so many of you.
+I like to watch you weaving--
+Altogether and with precision
+Each his ray--
+Your tracery of light,
+Making a shining way about America.
+
+I note your infinite reactions--
+In glassware
+And sequin
+And puddles
+And bits of jet--
+And here and there a diamond...
+
+But you do not yet see me,
+Who am a torch blown along the wind,
+Flickering to a spark
+But never out.
+
+BABEL
+
+Oh, God did cunningly, there at Babel--
+Not mere tongues dividing, but soul from soul,
+So that never again should men be able
+To fashion one infinite, towering whole.
+
+THE FIDDLER
+
+In a little Hungarian cafe
+Men and women are drinking
+Yellow wine in tall goblets.
+
+Through the milky haze of the smoke,
+The fiddler, under-sized, blond,
+Leans to his violin
+As to the breast of a woman.
+Red hair kindles to fire
+On the black of his coat-sleeve,
+Where his white thin hand
+Trembles and dives,
+Like a sliver of moonlight,
+When wind has broken the water.
+
+DAWN WIND
+
+Wind, just arisen--
+(Off what cool mattress of marsh-moss
+In tented boughs leaf-drawn before the stars,
+Or niche of cliff under the eagles?)
+You of living things,
+So gay and tender and full of play--
+Why do you blow on my thoughts--like cut flowers
+Gathered and laid to dry on this paper, rolled out of dead wood?
+
+I see you
+Shaking that flower at me with soft invitation
+And frisking away,
+Deliciously rumpling the grass...
+
+So you fluttered the curtains about my cradle,
+Prattling of fields
+Before I had had my milk...
+Did I stir on my pillow, making to follow you, Fleet One?
+I--swaddled, unwinged, like a bird in the egg.
+
+Let be
+My dreams that crackle under your breath...
+You have the dust of the world to blow on...
+Do not tag me and dance away, looking back...
+I am too old to play with you,
+Eternal Child.
+
+NORTH WIND
+
+I love you, malcontent
+Male wind--
+Shaking the pollen from a flower
+Or hurling the sea backward from the grinning sand.
+
+Blow on and over my dreams...
+Scatter my sick dreams...
+Throw your lusty arms about me...
+Envelop all my hot body...
+Carry me to pine forests--
+Great, rough-bearded forests...
+Bring me to stark plains and steppes...
+I would have the North to-night--
+The cold, enduring North.
+
+And if we should meet the Snow,
+Whirling in spirals,
+And he should blind my eyes...
+Ally, you will defend me--
+You will hold me close,
+Blowing on my eyelids.
+
+THE DESTROYER
+
+I am of the wind...
+A wisp of the battering wind...
+
+I trail my fingers along the Alps
+And an avalanche falls in my wake...
+I feel in my quivering length
+When it buries the hamlet beneath...
+
+I hurriedly sweep aside
+The cities that clutter our path...
+As we whirl about the circle of the globe...
+As we tear at the pillars of the world...
+Open to the wind,
+The Destroyer!
+The wind that is battering at your gates.
+
+LULLABY
+
+Rock-a-by baby, woolly and brown...
+(There's a shout at the door an' a big red light...)
+Lil' coon baby, mammy is down...
+Han's that hold yuh are steady an' white...
+
+Look piccaninny--such a gran' blaze
+Lickin' up the roof an' the sticks of home--
+Ever see the like in all yo' days!
+--Cain't yuh sleep, mah bit-of-honey-comb?
+
+Rock-a-by baby, up to the sky!
+Look at the cherries driftin' by--
+Bright red cherries spilled on the groun'--
+Piping-hot cherries at nuthin' a poun'!
+
+Hush, mah lil' black-bug--doan yuh weep.
+Daddy's run away an' mammy's in a heap
+By her own fron' door in the blazin' heat
+Outah the shacks like warts on the street...
+
+An' the singin' flame an' the gleeful crowd
+Circlin' aroun'... won't mammy be proud!
+With a stone at her hade an' a stone on her heart,
+An' her mouth like a red plum, broken apart...
+
+See where the blue an' khaki prance,
+Adding brave colors to the dance
+About the big bonfire white folks make--
+Such gran' doin's fo' a lil' coon's sake!
+
+Hear all the eagah feet runnin' in town--
+See all the willin' han's reach outah night--
+Han's that are wonderful, steady an' white!
+To toss up a lil' babe, blinkin' an' brown...
+
+Rock-a-by baby--higher an' higher!
+Mammy is sleepin' an' daddy's run lame...
+(Soun' may yuh sleep in yo' cradle o' fire!)
+Rock-a-by baby, hushed in the flame...
+
+(An incident of the East St. Louis Race Riots, when some white women flung
+a living colored baby into the heart of a blazing fire.)
+
+THE FOUNDLING
+
+Snow wraiths circle us
+Like washers of the dead,
+Flapping their white wet cloths
+Impatiently
+About the grizzled head,
+Where the coarse hair mats like grass,
+And the efficient wind
+With cold professional baste
+Probes like a lancet
+Through the cotton shirt...
+
+About us are white cliffs and space.
+No façades show,
+Nor roof nor any spire...
+All sheathed in snow...
+The parasitic snow
+That clings about them like a blight.
+
+Only detached lights
+Float hazily like greenish moons,
+And endlessly
+Down the whore-street,
+Accouched and comforted and sleeping warm,
+The blizzard waltzes with the night.
+
+THE WOMAN WITH JEWELS
+
+The woman with jewels sits in the cafe,
+Spraying light like a fountain.
+Diamonds glitter on her bulbous fingers
+And on her arms, great as thighs,
+Diamonds gush from her ear-lobes over the goitrous throat.
+She is obesely beautiful.
+Her eyes are full of bleared lights,
+Like little pools of tar, spilled by a sailor in mad haste for shore...
+And her mouth is scarlet and full--only a little crumpled--
+     like a flower that has been pressed apart...
+
+Why does she come alone to this obscure basement--
+She who should have a litter and hand-maidens to support her
+     on either side?
+
+She ascends the stairway, and the waiters turn to look at her,
+     spilling the soup.
+The black satin dress is a little lifted, showing the dropsical legs
+     in their silken fleshings...
+The mountainous breasts tremble...
+There is an agitation in her gems,
+That quiver incessantly, emitting trillions of fiery rays...
+She erupts explosive breaths...
+Every step is an adventure
+From this...
+The serpent's tooth
+Saved Cleopatra.
+
+SUBMERGED
+
+I have known only my own shallows--
+Safe, plumbed places,
+Where I was wont to preen myself.
+
+But for the abyss
+I wanted a plank beneath
+And horizons...
+
+I was afraid of the silence
+And the slipping toe-hold...
+
+Oh, could I now dive
+Into the unexplored deeps of me--
+Delve and bring up and give
+All that is submerged, encased, unfolded,
+That is yet the best.
+
+ART AND LIFE
+
+When Art goes bounding, lean,
+Up hill-tops fired green
+To pluck a rose for life.
+
+Life like a broody hen
+Cluck-clucks him back again.
+
+But when Art, imbecile,
+Sits old and chill
+On sidings shaven clean,
+And counts his clustering
+Dead daisies on a string
+With witless laughter....
+
+Then like a new Jill
+Toiling up a hill
+Life scrambles after.
+
+BROOKLYN BRIDGE
+
+Pythoness body--arching
+Over the night like an ecstasy--
+I feel your coils tightening...
+And the world's lessening breath.
+
+DREAMS
+
+Men die...
+Dreams only change their houses.
+They cannot be lined up against a wall
+And quietly buried under ground,
+And no more heard of...
+However deep the pit and heaped the clay--
+Like seedlings of old time
+Hooding a sacred rose under the ice cap of the world--
+Dreams will to light.
+
+THE FIRE
+
+The old men of the world have made a fire
+To warm their trembling hands.
+They poke the young men in.
+The young men burn like withes.
+
+If one run a little way,
+The old men are wrath.
+They catch him and bind him and throw him again to the flames.
+Green withes burn slow...
+And the smoke of the young men's torment
+Rises round and sheer as the trunk of a pillared oak,
+And the darkness thereof spreads over the sky....
+
+Green withes burn slow...
+And the old men of the world sit round the fire
+And rub their hands....
+But the smoke of the young men's torment
+Ascends up for ever and ever.
+
+A MEMORY
+
+I remember
+The crackle of the palm trees
+Over the mooned white roofs of the town...
+The shining town...
+And the tender fumbling of the surf
+On the sulphur-yellow beaches
+As we sat... a little apart... in the close-pressing night.
+
+The moon hung above us like a golden mango,
+And the moist air clung to our faces,
+Warm and fragrant as the open mouth of a child
+And we watched the out-flung sea
+Rolling to the purple edge of the world,
+Yet ever back upon itself...
+As we...
+
+Inadequate night...
+And mooned white memory
+Of a tropic sea...
+How softly it comes up
+Like an ungathered lily.
+
+THE EDGE
+
+I thought to die that night in the solitude where they would never find me...
+But there was time...
+And I lay quietly on the drawn knees of the mountain,
+     staring into the abyss...
+I do not know how long...
+I could not count the hours, they ran so fast
+Like little bare-foot urchins--shaking my hands away...
+But I remember
+Somewhere water trickled like a thin severed vein...
+And a wind came out of the grass,
+Touching me gently, tentatively, like a paw.
+
+As the night grew
+The gray cloud that had covered the sky like sackcloth
+Fell in ashen folds about the hills,
+Like hooded virgins, pulling their cloaks about them...
+There must have been a spent moon,
+For the Tall One's veil held a shimmer of silver...
+
+That too I remember...
+And the tenderly rocking mountain
+Silence
+And beating stars...
+
+Dawn
+Lay like a waxen hand upon the world,
+And folded hills
+Broke into a sudden wonder of peaks, stemming clear and cold,
+Till the Tall One bloomed like a lily,
+Flecked with sun,
+Fine as a golden pollen--
+It seemed a wind might blow it from the snow.
+
+I smelled the raw sweet essences of things,
+And heard spiders in the leaves
+And ticking of little feet,
+As tiny creatures came out of their doors
+To see God pouring light into his star...
+
+... It seemed life held
+No future and no past but this...
+
+And I too got up stiffly from the earth,
+And held my heart up like a cup...
+
+THE GARDEN
+
+Bountiful Givers,
+I look along the years
+And see the flowers you threw...
+Anemones
+And sprigs of gray
+Sparse heather of the rocks,
+Or a wild violet
+Or daisy of a daisied field...
+But each your best.
+
+I might have worn them on my breast
+To wilt in the long day...
+I might have stemmed them in a narrow vase
+And watched each petal sallowing...
+I might have held them so--mechanically--
+Till the wind winnowed all the leaves
+And left upon my hands
+A little smear of dust.
+
+Instead
+I hid them in the soft warm loam
+Of a dim shadowed place...
+Deep
+In a still cool grotto,
+Lit only by the memories of stars
+And the wide and luminous eyes
+Of dead poets
+That love me and that I love...
+Deep... deep...
+Where none may see--not even ye who gave--
+About my soul your garden beautiful.
+
+UNDER-SONG
+
+There is music in the strong
+     Deep-throated bush,
+Whisperings of song
+     Heard in the leaves' hush--
+Ballads of the trees
+     In tongues unknown--
+A reminiscent tone
+     On minor keys...
+
+Boughs swaying to and fro
+     Though no winds pass...
+Faint odors in the grass
+     Where no flowers grow,
+And flutterings of wings
+     And faint first notes,
+Once babbled on the boughs
+     Of faded springs.
+
+Is it music from the graves
+     Of all things fair
+Trembling on the staves
+     Of spacious air--
+Fluted by the winds
+     Songs with no words--
+Sonatas from the throats
+     Of master birds?
+
+One peering through the husk
+     Of darkness thrown
+May hear it in the dusk--
+     That ancient tone,
+Silvery as the light
+     Of long dead stars
+Yet falling through the night
+     In trembling bars.
+
+A WORN ROSE
+
+Where to-day would a dainty buyer
+Imbibe your scented juice,
+Pale ruin with a heart of fire;
+Drain your succulence with her lips,
+Grown sapless from much use...
+Make minister of her desire
+A chalice cup where no bee sips--
+     Where no wasp wanders in?
+
+Close to her white flesh housed an hour,
+     One held you... her spent form
+Drew on yours for its wasted dower--
+What favour could she do you more?
+     Yet, of all who drink therein,
+     None know it is the warm
+Odorous heart of a ravished flower
+Tingles so in her mouth's red core...
+
+IRON WINE
+
+The ore in the crucible is pungent, smelling like acrid wine,
+It is dusky red, like the ebb of poppies,
+And purple, like the blood of elderberries.
+Surely it is a strong wine--juice distilled of the fierce iron.
+I am drunk of its fumes.
+I feel its fiery flux
+Diffusing, permeating,
+Working some strange alchemy...
+So that I turn aside from the goodly board,
+So that I look askance upon the common cup,
+And from the mouths of crucibles
+Suck forth the acrid sap.
+
+DISPOSSESSED
+
+Tender and tremulous green of leaves
+Turned up by the wind,
+Twanging among the vines--
+Wind in the grass
+Blowing a clear path
+For the new-stripped soul to pass...
+
+The naked soul in the sunlight...
+Like a wisp of smoke in the sunlight
+On the hill-side shimmering.
+
+Dance light on the wind, little soul,
+Like a thistle-down floating
+Over the butterflies
+And the lumbering bees...
+
+Come away from that tree
+And its shadow grey as a stone...
+
+Bathe in the pools of light
+On the hillside shimmering--
+Shining and wetted and warm in the sun-spray falling like golden rain--
+
+But do not linger and look
+At that bleak thing under the tree.
+
+THE STAR
+
+Last night
+I watched a star fall like a great pearl into the sea,
+Till my ego expanding encompassed sea and star,
+Containing both as in a trembling cup.
+
+THE TIDINGS
+(Easter 1916)
+
+Censored lies that mimic truth...
+     Censored truth as pale as fear...
+My heart is like a rousing bell--
+     And but the dead to hear...
+
+My heart is like a mother bird,
+     Circling ever higher,
+And the nest-tree rimmed about
+     By a forest fire...
+
+My heart is like a lover foiled
+     By a broken stair--
+They are fighting to-night in Sackville Street,
+     And I am not there!
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Ghetto and Other Poems, by Lola Ridge
+
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