As I sit in my little fifth-floor room—­
Bare,
Save for bed and chair,
And coppery stains
Left by seeping rains
On the low ceiling
And green plaster walls,
Where when night falls
Golden lady-bugs
Come out of their holes,
And roaches, sepia-brown, consort... 
I hear bells pealing
Out of the gray church at Rutgers street,
Holding its high-flung cross above the Ghetto,
And, one floor down across the court,
The parrot screaming: 
Vorwärts...  Vorwärts...

The parrot frowsy-white,
Everlastingly swinging
On its iron bar.

A little old woman,
With a wig of smooth black hair
Gummed about her shrunken brows,
Comes sometimes on the fire escape. 
An old stooped mother,
The left shoulder low
With that uneven droopiness that women know
Who have suckled many young... 
Yet I have seen no other than the parrot there.

I watch her mornings as she shakes her rugs
Feebly, with futile reach
And fingers without clutch. 
Her thews are slack
And curved the ruined back
And flesh empurpled like old meat,
Yet each conspires
To feed those guttering fires
With which her eyes are quick.

On Friday nights
Her candles signal
Infinite fine rays
To other windows,
Coupling other lights,
Linking the tenements
Like an endless prayer.

She seems less lonely than the bird
That day by day about the dismal house
Screams out his frenzied word... 
That night by night—­
If a dog yelps
Or a cat yawls
Or a sick child whines,
Or a door screaks on its hinges,
Or a man and woman fight—­
Sends his cry above the huddled roofs: 
Vorwärts...  Vorwärts...

VI

In this dingy cafe
The old men sit muffled in woollens. 
Everything is faded, shabby, colorless, old... 
The chairs, loose-jointed,
Creaking like old bones—­
The tables, the waiters, the walls,
Whose mottled plaster
Blends in one tone with the old flesh.

Young life and young thought are alike barred,
And no unheralded noises jolt old nerves,
And old wheezy breaths
Pass around old thoughts, dry as snuff,
And there is no divergence and no friction
Because life is flattened and ground as by many mills.

And it is here the Committee—­
Sweet-breathed and smooth of skin
And supple of spine and knee,
With shining unpouched eyes
And the blood, high-powered,
Leaping in flexible arteries—­
The insolent, young, enthusiastic, undiscriminating Committee,
Who would placard tombstones
And scatter leaflets even in graves,
Comes trampling with sacrilegious feet!

The old men turn stiffly,
Mumbling to each other. 
They are gentle and torpid and busy with eating. 
But one lifts a face of clayish pallor,
There is a dull fury in his eyes, like little rusty grates. 
He rises slowly,
Trembling in his many swathings like an awakened mummy,
Ridiculous yet terrible. 
—­And the Committee flings him a waste glance,
Dropping a leaflet by his plate.