PITIFUL IN YOUR BRAVERY

Pitiful in your bravery, you stand

Shielding him. Oh, but you are young! You give
Yourself as heather to a waste of land,

And turn the barren soil in which you live
To beauty. . . . You, who valiantly blow

Your youth across his shriveled years, and come
With your fierce pride, and at the last will go
With head unbowed, eyes dark with scorn, like some
Diana who has run and lost the race

Yet found the running sweet- O you, as slim
And tireless as Time, with your child's face
And timid hands, why have you chosen him
To shield?-to love? Why must you be so dull
And steadfast in your youth? . . . and beautiful!

THE TRAGIC FEW

We hold bright pennies in our hand,

We pay to hear the penny band,

We laugh and joke and listen well,

And all we hear we tell.

Only we do not dare to beat

A cymbal or a little drum;

Only we dare not come

Too near to all the shouting crowd,

Or sing too loud.

We are the tragic few

Who smile and greet

Each other when we meet,
Cry and kiss each other
When we die ...

Oh, but we hold

Avidly to the accustomed mold!

We who are of the earth,

Who dare not fling our yellow pennies high-
We who buy mirth.

And pay to hear the penny band,

We cannot understand.

Babette Deutsch

Babette Deutsch, one of the most promising of the younger poetcritics, was born September 22, 1895, in New York City. She received her B.A. at Barnard College in 1917, doing subsequent work at the new School for Social Research.

Banners (1919) has a rich emotional content, the expression of a high-strung, apperceptive nature. Honey out of the Rock (1925) is a less unified but scarcely less sensitive volume; few of the pages lack the eager seriousness which characterize Miss Deutsch's writing.

In collaboration with her husband, Avrahm Yarmolinsky, she has published two anthologies: Modern Russian Poetry (1921) and Contemporary German Poetry (1923).

THE DEATH OF A CHILD1

Are you at ease now,

Do you

suck content

From death's dark nipple between your wan lips?

Now that the fever of the day is spent

And anguish slips

From the small limbs,

And they lie lapped in rest,

The young head pillowed soft upon that indurate breast. No, you are quiet,

1 From Banners by Babette Deutsch. Copyright, 1919. George H. Doran Co., Publishers.

And forever,

Tho for us the silence is so loud with tears,
Wherein we hear the dreadful-footed years
Echoing, but your quick laughter never,
Never your stumbling run, your sudden face
Thrust in bright scorn upon our solemn fears.
Now the dark mother holds you close.
We loved so,

How you lie,

So strangely still, unmoved so utterly
Dear yet, but, oh, a little alien too.

.

O, you

IN A MUSEUM

Here stillness sounds like echoes in a tomb.
The light falls cold upon these antique toys
Whereby men sought to turn the scales of doom:
Jade gods, a ritual of rigid boys.

Warm blood was spent for this unwindowed stone
Tinct with the painted pleasures of the dead;
For secrets of unwithering flesh and bone—
With these old Egypt's night was comforted.

We lean upon the glass, our curious eyes
Staring at death, three thousand years remote.
And vanity, the worm that never dies,
Feeds on your silver ring and Pharaoh's coat.
And are these heartbeats, then, less perilous?
Since death is close, and death is death for us.

Alter Brody

Alter Brody was born at Kartúshkiya-Beróza, Province of Grodno, Russia, November 1, 1895. He came to New York City at the age of eight and, after a cursory schooling, wrote transla

tions for certain Jewish and American newspapers. His first poems appeared in The Seven Arts in 1916-17.

In A Family Album (1918) one sees the impress of a tense and original mind, of imagination that is fed by strengthening fact, of sight that is sharpened by insight. Many of Brody's lines are uncouth and awkward; what music he achieves is mostly fortuitous. And yet his pages are filled with a picturesque honesty and uncompromising beauty. Much of this work is an interpretation of the modern world against a background of old dreams: young America seen through the eyes of old Russia.

Timidly

A CITY PARK

Against a background of brick tenements
Some trees spread their branches

Skyward.

They are thin and sapless,

They are bent and weary—

Tamed with captivity;

And they huddle behind the fence
Swaying helplessly before the wind,
Forward and backward,

Like a group of panicky deer

Caught in a cage.

GHETTO TWILIGHT

An infinite weariness comes into the faces of the old

tenements,

As they stand massed together on the block,

Tall and thoughtfully silent,

In the enveloping twilight.

Pensively,

They eye each other across the street,

Through their dim windows

With a sad recognizing stare;

Watching the red glow fading in the distance,
At the end of the street

Behind the black church spires;

Watching the vague sky lowering overhead,

Purple with clouds of colored smoke

From the extinguished sunset;

Watching the tired faces coming home from work—

Like dry-breasted hags

Welcoming their children to their withered arms.

Louis Ginsberg

Louis Ginsberg was born October 1, 1896, at Newark, New Jersey, where he still lives. He was educated at Rutgers College and received his M.A. at Columbia University, 1924. Since 1918 he has been teaching in the high schools of New Jersey and was, for a while, editor of a book page on The Newark Ledger.

His volume, The Attic of the Past (1920), is frankly immature. But, half-buried beneath juvenile echoes, there are several lyrics which seem to promise more than mere smooth imitation. Ginsberg's recent work begins to fulfil this promise. Obviously influenced by the brightly colored simplicities of Lizette Woodworth Reese, Ginsberg has the gift of song. And if the music is not entirely his own, at least he knows how it should be sung.

A QUIET STREET AFTER RAIN

Glittering keen, all things appear
Clairvoyant, carved, and crystal-clear.
Happy to watch the raindrops cease,
Houses are honeycombed with peace;
And dazzling with a blazing show,
Windows are pelting suns below.
Colors are ambushing the sense
With silent, flaming eloquence,
While every front-yard lawn is seen

Twinkling a myriad tongues of green.