But you said: “Listen:—I will lay my hand over all the wild notes and sweet notes you have heard and they will be hushed. I will kill the songs that lie unborn in the earth and the sea and the cherry trees and in the white throats of birds and women and in the hearts of men.” And I wondered how such a little one as you could hush so great a chorus. But you came closer to me and said: “I have come to destroy the world for you, to pluck out every little blade of grass and every flower, to brush away the stars and kick over the hills and tear up all the fields.” It was dark in the little room where we were and I sighed. And you came closer to me and said: “I will gather up in a great, black bag everyone and everything and every God you have known and I will drop them into a great, black hole. And listen:—and then you will be alone.” II. The Synagogue This street in the ghetto looks at night Like a prison corridor, And the houses facing it are dark cells. And then you come to a block where the rickety, thin tenements Rise like gnawed, patient pencils tracing crazy star lines In the sky. And then you come to the Synagogue of Judas the Servant, A little church of the Jews Crouching on its knees And enveloped in the rags of cheap saloons and hovels. It thrusts its iron star into the night Like a strange voice whispering in a dark place. And its stained walls impregnated with an ancient faith Murmur stoically to the stars of burning prayers and hopeless sobs And other things they have never heard. And if you stand before it for a time Strange wild things will cry out of the shadows, And you will see the torn, bleeding image of a race Whom Christ crucified. In the Sun O what a day! The buildings are bursting into bloom— Huge, dazzling flowers sweeping against the heaven; Dizzy ferns waving like dreadful fans under the flying clouds. The shining windows flutter down like a shower of golden petals. O what a day! The buildings are crashing into bloom; Gleaming stalks of purple sprawling with a graceful frenzy into space. Smoke monsters dance lazily over their heads. The sky swims like a blue butterfly in and out among them. The streets race away. A golden wind sweeps with a roar through the world that has become a fierce gorgeous garden, and it nods breathlessly. Out of its blazing depths color leaps and the growling music of a torn God singing in pain. O what a day. Beauty bursting into madness. On the Beach The lake comes gliding in and in, And gliding out it goes, Running up and back on the ribbon of the beach That plays with its silver toes.