Songs of Labor and Other Poems by Morris Rosenfeld

Translated from the Yiddish by Rose Pastor Stokes and Helena Frank

Contents

In the Factory My Boy The Nightingale to the Workman What is the World? Despair Whither? From Dawn to Dawn The Candle Seller The Pale Operator The Beggar Family A Millionaire September Melodies Depression The Canary Want and I The Phantom Vessel To my Misery O Long the Way To the Fortune Seeker My Youth In the Wilderness I’ve Often Laughed Again I Sing my Songs Liberty A Tree in the Ghetto The Cemetery Nightingale The Creation of Man Journalism Pen and Shears For Hire A Fellow Slave The Jewish May The Feast of Lights Chanukah Thoughts Sfēré Measuring the Graves The First Bath of Ablution Atonement Evening Prayer Exit Holiday 

SONGS OF LABOR AND OTHER POEMS

 In the Factory

Oh, here in the shop the machines roar so wildly, That oft, unaware that I am, or have been, I sink and am lost in the terrible tumult; And void is my soul... I am but a machine. I work and I work and I work, never ceasing; Create and create things from morning till e’en; For what?—and for whom—Oh, I know not! Oh, ask not! Who ever has heard of a conscious machine?

No, here is no feeling, no thought and no reason; This life-crushing labor has ever supprest The noblest and finest, the truest and richest, The deepest, the highest and humanly best. The seconds, the minutes, they pass out forever, They vanish, swift fleeting like straws in a gale. I drive the wheel madly as tho’ to o’ertake them,— Give chase without wisdom, or wit, or avail.

The clock in the workshop,—it rests not a moment; It points on, and ticks on: Eternity—Time; And once someone told me the clock had a meaning,— Its pointing and ticking had reason and rhyme. And this too he told me,—or had I been dreaming,— The clock wakened life in one, forces unseen, And something besides;... I forget what; Oh, ask not! I know not, I know not, I am a machine.

At times, when I listen, I hear the clock plainly;— The reason of old—the old meaning—is gone! The maddening pendulum urges me forward To labor and labor and still labor on. The tick of the clock is the Boss in his anger! The face of the clock has the eyes of a foe; The clock—Oh, I shudder—dost hear how it drives me? It calls me “Machine!” and it cries to me “Sew!”

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