The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ghetto and Other Poems, by Lola Ridge

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Title: The Ghetto and Other Poems

Author: Lola Ridge

Posting Date: August 17, 2012 [EBook #4332] Release Date: August, 2003 First Posted: January 8, 2002

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GHETTO AND OTHER POEMS ***

Produced by Catherine Daly

  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,