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.
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