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...