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How strange
it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the
street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the
never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and
down!
The trees are white with dust, that o'er their
sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the southwind's
breath,
While underneath these leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.
And these
sepulchral stones, so old and brown,
That pave with
level flags their burial-place,
Seem like the tablets
of the Law, thrown down
And broken by Moses at the
mountain's base.
The very names recorded here are
strange,
Of foreign accent, and of different climes;
Alvares and Rivera interchange
With Abraham and Jacob
of old times.
"Blessed be God! for he created Death!"
The mourner said, "and Death is rest and peace!"
Then
added, in the certainty of faith,
"And giveth Life
that nevermore shall cease."
Closed are the portals
of their Synagogue,
No Psalms of David now the
silence break,
No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue
In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.
Gone are the
living, but the dead remain,
And not neglected; for a
hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer
rain,
Still keeps their graves and their remembrance
green.
How came they here? What burst of Christian
hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove
o'er the sea -that desert desolate -
These Ishmaels
and Hagars of mankind?
They lived in narrow streets
and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk
and mire;
Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of fire.
All their
lives long, with the unleavened bread
And bitter
herbs of exile and its fears,
The wasting famine of
the heart they fed,
And slaked its thirst with marah
of their tears.
Anathema maranatha! was the cry
That rang from town to town, from street to street:
At every gate the accursed Mordecai
Was mocked and
jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.
Pride and
humiliation hand in hand
Walked with them through the
world where'er they went;
Trampled and beaten were
they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.
For in the background figures vague and vast
Of
patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,
And all the
great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in
the coming time.
And thus forever with reverted look
The mystic volume of the world they read,
Spelling it
backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a
Legend of the Dead.
But ah! what once has been shall
be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the
dead nations never rise again.
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