The Ghetto and Other Poems

Excerpt

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....