THE LAST CORPSES IN THE DESERT
UP, wanderers in the wild, and come away!
Long is the journey yet and long the fray.
Enough of roving now in desert places—
There lies a great, wide road before your faces.
But forty years of wandering have sped,
And yet we leave six hundred thousand dead.
Dishonoured let them lie, across the pack
They bore from out of Egypt on their back.
Sweet be their dreams of garlic and of leek,
Of flesh-pots wide, of fatty steam and reek.
Around the last dead slave, maybe to-night,
The desert wind with desert beast shall fight,
And joyously to-morrow’s dawning shine
Upon the firstlings of a mighty line,
And lest the sands with all their sleepers start,
Let each man’s footfall sound but in his heart.
Let each man in his heart hear God’s voice say:
‘A new land’s border shalt thou cross to-day!
‘No more the quails from heav’n, no more light bread—
The bread of toil, fruit of the hands, instead.
‘No more wild tents pitched under heaven’s dome—
Another kind shall ye set up for home.
‘Beneath His sky, the wilderness outside,
God has another world that reaches wide,
‘Beyond the howling desert with its sand,
There waits beneath His stars the Promised Land.’
CH. N. BYALIK, 1896.
(Trans. Helena Frank.)