Herschell Bek - 5 Short Poems (1924-26)

Forgotten Poems #58

 
              —: Steel Rails :—

            Steel rails,
       Straight runners ahead,
       Swift runners into the future.

       Take the wise strength of them
       In the sure fixing of clean parallels,
       Running ahead into a dream of merging.

       Take them,
       Let the meaning and the secret
       Clutch a hold of you,
              A sure strong hold
              Under the heart.
  

 
              —: Business :—

       Over the butcher's counter,
       Over the baker's counter,
       They slip across to you
              so much for so much.

       Through the iron bars,
       To a man with a number for a name,
       They shove across
               a little for everything.

       I remember seeing the eyes of an old woman.
       And the old eyes of a hungry child,
       Boring through the plate glass window
       Of a baker's shop,
       And they got
              nothing for nothing.
 

 
              —: Street Cleaner :—

       Whisper it into the ear of God,
       He knows how you fell about,
              O cleaner of streets!
       O handler of broom and shovel!
              going up and down the streets,
              sweeping up the dust
       And the dirt and the dung,
              day after day after day,
       And nobody giving you a tumble
       And nobody giving a damn—

       Whisper it into the ear of God,
       He knows how you feel about it,
              trying to keep the streets clean
              of the dirt and the dust
              and, always, the dirt and the dust
              coming back again—
       Hasn't He held down your job
       For a time too long to remember?
 

 
              —: Fruit :—

            The weight of fruit
       Makes these apple trees
       Stand gnarled and bent.

       I remember an old woman
       Who had seen many years
       And borne many children,
       Standing so,
       Tree-wise and tree-content.
 

 
              —: Summer Heat :—

            Because
       the sky
       in this noon-day heat
       pushes downward
       like a burning sheet of bronze,
       the fountain's
       slender plume of water
       could rise no higher
       for all its trying.
 

Herschell Bek (p. 1924-27, etc.) was a poet from New York, and published in popular arts magazines like The Forge and Opportunity, and socialist publications like The Daily Worker and The Liberator. He was also included in the “first anthology of American poetry” to be translated “into the Ukrainian language,” edited by Ivan Yulianovych Kulyk, a Ukranian poet, diplomat, and revolutionary. (see: Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Anti-Imperial Choice, 2009)

Restored woodcut by Murvin W. Gilbert, from The Forge (1927).

 
              For Herschell Bek
                 By Dick Whyte

       new gods
       are made
       of more than steel,

       biting at the sun
       with
       coins in their eyes:

       given the speed
       at which
       nothing occurs,

       there is time
       for a song
  

Forgotten Poets Presents:

Forgotten Poems, a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print poetry from the late-1800s and early-1900s. Explore the archives:

More poems about work . . .

More poems about trees . . .