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.





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.





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!








 
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