Dawn to dusk, your hands and eyes
Bent over sewing -- girl, don't cry.
Tomorrow it shall come to pass;
Your worries will die like poisoned mice.
In that day, in iron and stone,
Men will roar like bears, while women,
Old men, and babies at the breast
Chase down robbers and arsonists.
My girl--what a fire! your beloved is coming
to carry you off, on bird wings.
This lyric is as ambiguous as a prophesy. Irony, violent and peaceful images, anger, and a bitter joy are at war in it, yet it is perfectly balanced.
I recently found a book (in English) by the Yiddish poet, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (1886-1932), called _In New-York_. He wrote about New York in the time of immigration, neon, the El and its noise and grit, poverty, ragtime, the heat of August sticking to the body at manual labor. An immigrant, Halpern contrasts the small Polish town and the Lower East Side with images as powerful as Pound's, and as brief.
But he also writes a night dream that surrounds the entire history of his people, and his relatives, with the personal mystery of his own existence "A Night." Two kinds of communities, one small, contained,God-centered,where everyone knew everyone, and its replacement, after days in steerage stink, by the American Dream and the reality of pragmatic sink-or-swim. A unique force of history in these poems.
He's Joyce's voice, but from the immigrant lonely Jew's angle of sight: "A shout in the street. A nightmare from which I am struggling to awake."
If Halpern had lived his life in Galicia, he would have been a great scholar, but not an American poet inspired to depict what was left of humanity after fear of God evaporated into the sultry air of sink or swim.
"[The little man] bows deeper to the glittering machine.
Will he tear his hands with his own nails?
(A condemned man will try to gnaw through his prison bars)."
Hand in hand with devotion in old Poland went ignorance of individual potential, and strict limits set on wishes, desires, and sensual enjoyments by the old world Rabbis and their interpretations of Talmud. The latter were painstakingly made in years of sitting and debating in freezing or sweltering study houses. They heroically continued to do so, even as their fellow villagers left for America, WWI stamped out their shtetl's life, and the Nazis came for them, tearing prayer shawls and phylacteries from shoulders and foreheads. Halpern's "A Night" is an epic poem about the history of the Jews. And it is the opposite of the cheap sentimentality we hear too much of today.
"My heart cries with joy, and glows.
My heart cries and sings, dreaming
In the shadow of my tree.
The chain spins, winding
Seven times around my arm.
The sun surrenders its life, and night descends."