Page:Poems by Isaac Rosenberg (1922).djvu/82



For shame! Our brothers’ twisted blood-smeared gums Tell we only have more room for wreck curtailed: For you, having no teeth to draw, it is no mercy Perhaps; but they might mangle your gums Or touch a nerve somewhere. He barred it now; And that is all his thanks, he, too, in peril. Be still, old man; wait a little.

Wait! All day some slow dark quadruped beats To pulp our springiness: All day some hoofed animal treads our veins, Leisurely—leisurely our energies flow out: All agonies created from the first day Have wandered hungry searching the world for us, Or they would perish like disused Behemoth. Is our Messiah one to unleash these agonies As Moses does, who gives us an Abinoah?

Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood,