True, they knelt not to greet the sun, Nor made the Moslem's creed their own, Of serving their Jehovah God, Thy scattered remnant dwell in peace? When will base calumny and wrong How Long, O Lord? IN the weary night they come to me, The tears that I left unshed, For the day must come and the sting of it, The light must come and the pain of it- But this I know as I reel along They say my soul is twisted and warped, When the lust for blood is hunger-felt When Kindness is taught at the end of a rope, What wonder the balm for the spirit fails I have ceased to long for the clasp of Love, I grip my trusty wander-staff In a journey without an end. My faith is strong as the primal rocks, I am Job of the nations-heir of wrongs, But why-Jehovah knows. ELIAS LIEBERMAN. In Exile TWILIGHT is here, soft breezes bow the grass, Day's sounds of various toil break slowly off, The yoke-freed oxen low, the patient ass Up from the prairie the tanned herdsmen pass With frothy pails, guiding with voices rough Their udder-lightened kine. Fresh smells of earth, The rich, black furrows of the glebe send forth. After the Southern day of heavy toil, How good to lie, with limbs relaxed, brows bare To evening's fan, and watch the smoke-wreaths coil Up from one's pipe-stem through the rayless air. So deem these unused tillers of the soil, Who stretched beneath the shadowing oak-tree, stare Peacefully on the star-unfolding skies, And name their life unbroken paradise. The hounded stag that has escaped the pack, And pants at ease within a thick-leaved dell; The unimprisoned bird that finds the track Through sun-bathed space, to where his fellows dwell; The martyr, granted respite from the rack, The death-doomed victim pardoned from his cell,Such only know the joy these exiles gain,Life's sharpest rapture is surcease of pain. Strange faces theirs, where through the Orient sun Of anguish branded by a world of sin, Freedom to love the law that Moses brought, Refuge o'er wave and continent, to link Hark! through the quiet evening air, their song Floats forth with wild sweet rhythm and glad refrain. They sing the conquest of the spirit strong, The soul that wrests the victory from pain; The noble joys of manhood that belong To comrades and to brothers. In their strain Rustle of palms and Eastern streams one hears, And the broad prairie melts in mist of tears. EMMA LAZARUS. BROT A Cry from Russia ROTHERS, my brothers-you that are free Are you blind that you do not heed the scars For he sucked, with the milk at his mother's breast, Wounds of the body and wounds of the soul Till a day when the Lord God made him whole The shining day he will bless the pain That has brought the Jew to his own again. Prosperous, florishing-kith and kin, HERMINE SCHWED. WH To Russia 'HO tamed your lawless Tartar blood? The Russian bear in ages when You strode your black, unbridled stud, Who girt the thews of your young prime The Jew, the Jew, the hated Jew. Who taught you tender Bible tales Of Jordan's holy harvest vales? Your Jew! Your Jew! Your hated Jew! JOAQUIN MILLER. |