POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG
Young Hebrew
For shame! Our brothers’ twisted blood-smeared gums
Tell we only have more room for wreck curtailed:
For you, having no teeth to draw, it is no mercy
Perhaps; but they might mangle your gums
Or touch a nerve somewhere. He barred it now;
And that is all his thanks, he, too, in peril.
Be still, old man; wait a little.
Old Hebrew
Wait!
All day some slow dark quadruped beats
To pulp our springiness:
All day some hoofed animal treads our veins,
Leisurely—leisurely our energies flow out:
All agonies created from the first day
Have wandered hungry searching the world for us,
Or they would perish like disused Behemoth.
Is our Messiah one to unleash these agonies
As Moses does, who gives us an Abinoah?
Young Hebrew
Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil
Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood,
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