THE NEEDLE

My body quivers to the needle's sting,
Meeting its point as tempered steel to steel;
But afterwards my cells in frenzy sing
The sharp incisive agony they feel,
Oh best it is when pain comes cruel-handed,
The fibre of the body lacerating,
When the hurt heart is tortured, iron-branded,
And fever makes its conquest unabating,
Than this sting with its numbing interlude,
So exquisite it brings no hint of pain,
Till moments after when a multitude
Of minute javelins whizl through
CLoude Mckay

CLaudia Mckay

LEGACY

Today the nice American departed.
On coming in from promenade I found
His literary stock he left for me.
Six books called Tarzan of the Apes, well bound,
A journal of the auto-financiers,
A book of Mrs. Ella Wilcox's verse,
The Red Book and the Blue Book magazine,
Reports of New York's Chamber of Commerce.

AFFIRMATION

Twilight when at its full eridian gold
Thy live shines warmth and splendour like the sun,
Twilight with loneliness descending cold,
Before thy juice of youth to fruit has run.
Yet do not down thy vision in the dark,
Oh lonely heart, and victim of disaster;
While through the mantling gloom there gleams a spark
And nature still holds mysteries to master.
Life has its compensations, even though
The gods may spoil the happy scheme of things,
And even loathsome lepers find their mates.
So man may meet disaster as a foe
And out of evil pluck the deadly stings;
Against the doom of the unfriendly fates.

RETREAT

After the nights like days, the days like nights,
Crowded with movement, filled and overflowing,
Whirling like circling birds in aimless flights,
Dipping round gilded domes and steepled heights,
Blessed is being here and without knowing
Or caring for the city ways and sights.

With peace dearer than love within my breast,
Blessed is being here behind the curtain,
Blessed to know the meaning of real rest,
Where even thought can at its virile beat
Be sweet, yet no less militant and certain
Than a proud eagle folded in its nest.

Beyond the wearing troubles of the street,
The little souls of men complaining woe,
Blessed is being in this strange retreat,
Blessed the sleepy hours so long and sweet,
That fold me in from life the friend and foe,
With kindly bands about my hands and feet.

Like music blown through tropical corn sheaves,
Blessed the foreign tongue that soothes and charms,
Like golden drops of rain from thick-thatched eaves
That fall into uplifted tania leaves,
Blessed disease, the bitter scourge, that warms
My long cold spirit that here new strength receives.

An American Patient.

Out in the corridor, from all the rest,
A private room shuts an American,
Who hides himself in fear and fever lest
Some fellow victims should his features scan.

He never takes the after-dinner walks
To see the foreign fickle autumn skies,
He never hears the patient's tonic talk,
He's afraid of meeting human eyes.

Strictly he keeps the true faith of his kind
And of his nation's high hypocrisy,
Perhaps he has a Y.M.C.A. mind,
Or may be of the Nordic Committee.

PAGEANT

The blind, the almost dumb, and the insane,
The lame with crutches bandaged everywhere,
The epileptic foaming where he fell,
The deaf, the paralytic crossed with care,

All congregated in this place of pain,
Like lepers kept together in a pale!
It seems a harsh romance of ancient times,
A modern version of a scripture tale.

Here is the fast of romance, where disease
Holds court in regal form, hurling defiance
At all *M* victims humble by his throne,
Contemptuous of the golden age of science.

A mother brings her bare-kneed student boy,
Timidly standing from the hardened rest,
Who spent, perhaps, his meagre dole to buy
A night of pleasure at a cheap whores breast.

Another mere girl-mother walks aloof,
Bewilderingly troubled and forlorn,
Bosoming, lullabying in her grief,
Her baby in disease conceived and born.

A strip of youth, moist-lipped and lolling tongued,
Goes at a never-changing trotting pace,
Companioned and holding guardian hands,
Each afternoon round his alloted space.

The pageant passes like a great nightmare
Of loathsome life, a lost soul's carnival
Of sin-darned mortals gathered here to win
Salvation through a fearful ritual.

Here broods disease, the green eyed priest of death,
Unmoved by human woe or wile or ire,
Casting his long and heavy shadow far
Over the bonded victims of desire.

ESCAPE

The quiet beauty of the white-washed walls,
Clean floors, white sheets, large windows, simple food,
The early sleeping and the early calls
That wake the ward at silvering dawn,—how good

This disciplined existence is for those
That file in rocking of the gutter²X smella,
Whose filthy patches and protruding toes
Are eloquent of life in putrid hells!

From haunting insecurity of toil,
The unwelcome warnings of approaching winter,
What happiness it is for them to foil
The dogging steps of poverty to enter

Where life is rendered merciful and smooth,
Far from the stink of slum and factory,
By gentle-minded women trained to soothe
The broken lives of poor humanity.

Chez Thomas Cook & fils

67 rue Cannebiere

Marseille, (B-du-Rhone) France

November 29, 1927

Dear Jo Herbst

I have been wishing to get in touch with you for some time, but hadn't your address. But I think I will reach you now through your review in the New Masses. I wrote to Andrew nearly a year ago at the Tribune in Paris, but he never replied, although the letter, which had my address on it was not returned, I had neglected to answer a letter of his, but he had happened to write at a time when I was way down in hard luck, just grubbing along in the gutter with no spirit in me for friendly correspondence.

Are you back in New York? Tell me, what became of your book? And what are you doing for yourself? I saw a story of Herman's in the New Masses. Was his book published? I get no magazines at all except The New Masses and a couple of Negro monthlies, so I don't know what is going on.

on in the American literary world. You know,
after you went away, I put aside my first auto-
biographical novel and wrote another from a
more objective and lighter point of view. It
was a sort of satire, no, really a comedy of
smart Negro life in Harlem, and a satire on the
fashionable white people who took them up. I
sent it to Knopf, but after some hesitation, they
turned it down. Nobody would take it and so I
began doing short stories. These at last got to
Harpers and they gave me a small advance to do a
novel of Harlem's Negro life. I did it and they
liked it very much and now I am doing another
about the Negroes here in Marseille. They gave
me $250 dollars to do it and the money is finished
and I have just one decent chapter to show for it!
So, as usual, I don't quite know where nor how I
am going. I make the best of the present, that's
all. It was an unpleasant summer for me, and I
suffered from severe head troubles.

Please write to me and if you have any Mer-
curys with Menken's blab, please send me some. I
Have an old machine now which has berned me well,