O the agony of having too much power!
In my passive palm are hundreds of lives.
Strange alchemy, they drain my blood.
My heart becomes iron; my brain copper; my eyes silver; my lips brass.
Merely by twitching a supple finger, I twirl lives from me,
Strong-winged or fluttering and broken.
They are my children: I am their mother and father.
I watch them live and die.
REAR PORCHES OF AN APARTMENT BUILDING
A sky that has never known sun, moon, or stars,
A sky that is like a dead, kind face
Would have the color of your eyes,
O servant-girl singing of pear-trees in the sun
And scraping the yellow fruit you once picked
When your lavender-white eyes were alive.
On the porch above you sit two women
With faces the color of dry brown earth;
They knit grey rosettes and nibble cakes.
And on the porch above them are three children
Gravely kissing each other’s foreheads,
And an ample nurse with a huge red fan....
The death of the afternoon to them
Is but the lengthening of blue-black shadows on brick walls.
TO ONE DEAD
Shaking nights, noons tame and dust-quiet, and wind-broken days
Were hands modelling your face.
Yet people glanced at you and pass on.
And now they speak of you,
Quickly weighing tiny, stray chips of you:
They who did not know you.
THE MASTER-POISONER
Maxwell Bodenheim and Ben Hecht
People