Pauline Leader - 4 Short Poems (1927-29)

Forgotten Poems #72

    
                  —: The Market-Place :—

       Stuff of men
       you come and go
       like not-quite-mute-birds
       scattering their furtive symphonies
       in a small closed parallel
       where the sinews of the sky
       are only the top boards
       nailed down.
     

    
                  —: Spirit Of The Street :—  

       Gradually, the street emerges distinct—an exile
       of silence, men, for the brief slant of a night
       have ceased to obscure it with the obscurity of its name.

       Only the wind—
       its spirit—
       fable that looms the moments of all skeletons' massives
       —is there—
       groping through the exile for the spirit of its vision.
    

    
                  —: Poem :—

Across the morning I spear the articulate flight of a bird and make
of it the design of my private disguise against the uncertain morning.

(Once, the earth hanging half-way like an imaginary shadow remarked
the palpitations of your white heart, bird; you carried your flight ever
nearer to the sun-vortex; that was your reply.)

    Forget the trembling bird           remember only the triumphant solution
of the sweep, Earth,—but O do not unravel it!          seeking the dusty
count of one more 'clarity'              You can find merely an endless swirl
of gauze  contriving somehow wantonly within the relativity of space to
be singularly free.
    

    
                   —: Epitaph :—

       Compromises are lean upon the night, O poet,
       when night betrays the evasions of the mind
              and heart with its lightnings;
       but once in a century the night discovers
              a nakedness . . .
       to such a one the night gives itself . . .
              not with an earthly nicety
       but more with that delicate complete submissiveness
              reserved for the moods of the wholly dead . . .
     

Pauline Leader (b. 1908) was: “A young poet living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Transition and in Poetry.” (Blues, 1929)

Alongside a handful of published poems, Leader also wrote an autobiography, titled And No Birds Sing (1931): “This memoir offers an unflinching look at the life of a deaf woman struggling with poverty and isolation in the bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village. In harrowing yet lyrical prose, Leader recounts her experience growing up as the daughter of Jewish immigrants in a small New England mill town. Born in 1908, Leader was exposed to frequent verbal and physical abuse. She became deaf at the age of 12, following a long illness. As a teenager, she ran away to New York City, where she found work in factories and sweatshops, and... sought community among the artists and eccentrics of Greenwich Village.” (Gallaudet University Press, 2016)

“In 1932, Ethel Mannin called the young Pauline Leader’s literary debut, ‘a terrible indictment of the social system and the moral code’, proclaiming, ‘everybody who doubts the need for a revolution should read this book’. The review appeared in Mannin’s monthly literature column, ‘Sagas of the Working Classes’, in the February edition of The New Leader, a magazine closely associated with the United States Socialist Party… But while Leader was indeed an outspoken communist, Mannin’s review is not a reaction to a manifesto. Leader’s And No Birds Sing is the first hand account of a deaf poet’s internal experience of disability and class and the external social structures which mediate and construct that experience.” (Carl Nelson, A Hundred Houses: Pauline Leader and the Spatial Poetics of Disability, 2019)

     
              For Pauline Leader
                  by Dick Whyte

               I.

       bigger & bigger

       shadows
       stretching across
       the dirt

               II.

       earth chants:
       to grow is to give
       to grow is to give
       to grow is to give
       to grow is to give . . .

                III.

       the gods do not listen
       & no birds sing
    

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