I
It is not to be bought for a penny
in the candy store, nor picked
from the bushes in the park. It may be found, perhaps,
in the ashes on the distant lots,
among the rusting cans and Jimpson weeds.
If you wish to eat fish freely,
cucumbers and melons,
you should have stayed in Egypt.
II
So proudly she came into the subway car
all who were not reading their newspapers saw
the head high and the slow tread —
coat wrinkled and her belongings in a paper bag,
face unwashed and the grey hair uncombed;
1
One night in April or May,
his daughter saw someone's hand
make the curtain which was drawn tightly across her window bulge
and ran to the adjoining room in her night clothes
where he and his son were sitting.
He ran around the house one way
and his son ran the other way
and they found a Negro
under a workbench
within six or eight feet of the window
holding a piece of plank before his face —
begging them not to shoot.
2
I
Land of Refuge
They landed and could
see nothing but
meadows and tall
trees —
cypress, nearly three
fathoms about at the
roots,
rising straight for
sixty or eighty feet
without a branch.
In the woods were
cedars, oaks, and
walnut trees;
some beech, some elm,
“The lamps are burning in the synagogue,
in the houses of study, in dark alleys....”
This should be the place.
This is the way
the guide book describes it. Excuse me, sir
can you tell me
where Eli lives, Eli the katzev —
slaughterer of cattle and poultry?
One of my ancestors.
Reb Haskel? Reb Shimin? My grandfathers.
This is the discipline that withstood the siege
of every Jew;
these are the prayer shawls that have proved
stronger than armor.
His father carved umbrella handles, but when umbrella
handles were made by machinery, there was only one
man for whom his father could work.
The pay was small, though it had once been a good trade.
They lived in the poorest part of the ghetto, near the lots
where people dump ashes.
His father was anxious that his son should stay at school and
get out of the mess he himself was in. “Learning is the
His mother stepped about her kitchen, complaining in a low
voice;
all day his father sat stooped at a sewing machine.
When he went to high school Webber was in his class.
Webber lived in a neighborhood where the houses are set in
lawns with trees beside the gutters.
The boys who live there, after school, take their skates and
hockey sticks and play in the streets until nightfall.
Passing the shop after school, he would look up at the sign
and go on, glad that his own life had to do with books.
Now at night when he saw the grey in his parents’ hair and
heard their talk of that day’ s worries and the next:
lack of orders, if orders, lack of workers, if workers, lack of
goods, if there were workers and goods, lack of orders
again,
The bread has become moldy
and the dates blown down by the wind;
the iron has slipped from the helve.
The wool was to by dyed red
but the dyer dyed it black.
The dead woman has forgotten her comb
and tube of eye-paint;
the dead cobbler has forgotten his knife,
the dead butcher his chopper,
and the dead carpenter his adze.
A goat can be driven off with a shout.
But where is the man to shout?
The bricks pile up, the laths are trimmed,
and the beams are ready. Where is the builder?
