The Ghetto and Other Poems | Page 4

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