The Ghetto and Other Poems | Page 9

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