POEM—

for Miss Kathleen Hanlon

"I am cherry alive," the little girl sang,
"Each morning I am something new:
I am apple, I am plum, I am just as excited
As the boys who made the Hallowe'en bang:
I am tree, I am cat, I am blossom too:
When I like, if I like, I can be someone new,
Some one very old, a witch in a zoo:
I can be someone else whenever I think who,
And I want to be everything sometimes too:
And the peach has a pit and I know that too,
And I put it in along with everything

To make the grown-ups laugh whenever I sing:
And I sing: *It is true; It is untrue;*
I know, I know, the true is untrue,
The peach has a pit, the pit has a peach:
And both may be wrong when I sing my song,
But I don't tell the grown-ups: because it is sad,
And I want them to laugh just like I do
Because they grew up and forgot what they knew
And they are sure I will forget it some day too.

They are wrong, When I sang my song, I knew, I knew!
I am red, I am gold, I am green, I am blue,
I will always be me, I will always be new!"

Delmore Schwartz

THE WOULD BE HUNGARIAN
The Innocence and Windows of-
Children and Childhood

by Delmore Schwartz

COME, let us meditate upon the fate of a little boy who wished to be Hungarian! Having been moved with his family to a new suburb, having been sent to a new school, the only Catholic school in the new suburb, Where all the other children were Hungarian,

He felt very sad and separate on the first day, he felt more and more separated and isolated

Because all the other boys and girls pitied and were sorry for him since he was not Hungarian! Hence they pitied and were sorry for him so much they gave him handsome gifts,

Presents of comic books, marbles and foreign coins, peppermints and candy, a pistol, and also their devoted sympathy, pity and friendship

Making him sadder still since now he saw how all Hungarians were very kind and generous, and he was not

Hungarian! Hence he was an immigrant, an alien: he was and he would be, Forever, no matter what, he could never become Hungarian!

Hungarian! Hence he went home on the first day, bearing his gifts and telling his parents how much he wished to be

Hungarian: in anguish, in anger,

Accusing them of depriving him, and misusing him: amusing them, So that he rose to higher fury, shouting and accusing them

—Because of you I am a stranger, monster, orang-outang!

Because of you (his hot tears say) I am an orang-outang! and not Hungarian! Worse than to have no bicycle, no shoes....

Behold how this poor boy, who wished so passionately to be Hungarian Suffered and knew the fate of being American.

Whether on Ellis Island, Plymouth Rock, Or in the secret places of the mind and heart

This is America—as poetry and hope

This is the fame, the game and the names of our fate:

This we must suffer or must celebrate.

The First Morning of the Second World

after black silence

1

Suddenly.

Suddenly and certainly, as I watched elsewhere, locked

And intent in that vigil in which the hunter is the hunted

As the mind is, seeking itself, falconer, falcon and hawk, victor and
victim,

Aware of the dry river beds, the droughts of the little deaths,
Sudden and overwhelming

Years rose and the damned waters of secret nature's underseas.

Where I had been before, tense and tired, was the edge of a winter
wood.

The gun of the mind ached in my numb and narrowed gaze,

Trembled a little, aimed at the pathless wood, and the snowclouded
icewhite sky,

Hearing the rush not of the birds rising from bush and thicket

thrashing and clacking,

But suddenly the pouring continuous sibilance of waterfalls,

Certainly and suddenly, for a moment's eternity, it was the

ecstasy and stillness of the white

wizard blizzard, the white god fallen, united,

entirely whiteness

The color of forgiveness, beginning and hope.

Quickly then and certainly it was the river of summer, blue as the

infinite curving blueness above us,

Little boats at anchor lolled or were lapped, and a yacht slowly

glided.

It was wholly holiday, holiday absolute, a silk and saraband day,

warm and gay and

Blue and white and vibrant as the pennants buoyant on the stadium

near us,

White, a milk whiteness, and also all the colors flaring, melting, or

flowing.

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SCHWARTZ / *The First Morning of the Second World*

There hope was, and the hopes, and the years past,
The beings I had known and forgotten and half-remembered or
remembered too often,
Some in rowboats sunned, as on a picnic, or waiting, as before a play,
the picnic and the play of eternity as summer, siesta, and
summit
— How could I have known that the years and the hopes were
human beings hated or loved,
Or known that I knew less and more than I supposed I supposed?
(So I questioned myself, in a voice familiar and strange)
There they were, all of them, and I was with them,
They were with me, and they were me, I was them, forever united
As we all moved forward in a consonance silent and moving
Seated and gazing,
Upon the beautiful river forever.

2

So we were as children on the painted wooden horses, rising and
falling, of the carnival's roulette
Singing or smiling, at times, as the lyric of a small music tinkled
above us
Saying: "The task is the round, the round is the task, the task and
the round are a dance, and
There is nothing to think but drink of love and knowledge, and
love's knowledge
When after and before are no more, and no more masks or
unmasking,
but only basking
(As the shining sea basks under the shining sun
In a radiance of swords and chandeliers dancing)
In the last love of knowledge, the first, when thought's abdication
quickens thought's exaltation,
In the last blessing and sunlight of love's knowledge."

I hardly knew when my lips parted. Started to move slowly
As in the rehearsal of half-remembered memorized
anthem, prayer, or spell
of heartwelling gratitude and recognition.
My lips trembled, fumbled, and in the depths and death of thought

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A murmur rose like the hidden humming of summer, when June
sleeps
In the radiant entrancings of warm light and green security.
Fumbling, feeling for what I had long supposed I had grasped and
cast aside as worthless,
the sparks or glitters of pleasure, trivial and transient.

— The phrases like faces came, lucid and vivid, separate, united,
sincere as pain
With the unity of meaning and emotion long lost, disbelieved or
denied,
As I sought with the words I had known a candid translation.
So I said then, in a language intimate and half-understood:
“I did not know . . . and I knew . . . surely I once knew . . .
I must have known . . .

Surely sometimes guessed at or suspected,
Knew and did not know what love is,
The measure of pleasure, the heart of joy, the light and the heart of
the light

Which makes all pleasure, joy and love come to be
As light alone gives all colors being, the measure and the treasure
Of the light which unites and distinguishes the bondage and
freedom in unity and distinction
Which is love . . . Love? . . . Is love? What is love?"

Suddenly and certainly I saw how surely the measure and treasure
of pleasure is being as being with, belonging
Figured and touched in the experience of voices in chorus.
Withness is ripeness,
Ripeness is withness,
To be is to be in love,
Love is the fullness of being.

3

For the gratification of action by those who enact it and at once
In the enacting behold it, actual and antiphonal, as antiphonal in
another and others who are with them and look to them,
toiling and smiling,

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Know the act and their enactment and another's and others' who
suffer the struggling,
The effort of effort, as in the toil and ecstacy of dancing and
climbing,

When they know immediately within them what they see
immediately without them, vivid in the faces,
lucid in the voices,

Each creating and increasing the other, as fire in fire,

And as the lover knows yes, knows loving and being loved, then,
Kissing as he is kissed: then only effort is gratitude, then toil is

ecstasy,

Suffering is satisfaction and both are neither but a third,

Beyond and containing the fear and the striving, the excitement and
the rapture:

The self is another but with and wholly the self, loving and beloved;
Is neither no more and both, passing from both beyond to the being

of being

Self-hooded selfhood seeks in the darkness and daylight blind and
lost.

Suddenly, suddenly and certainly

Then it was as waking in the waters of morning, in winter,
Certainly it was the first morning again,

Waking in the first morning to a world outside of whiteness united,
Transfigured, possessed by the blessedness of whiteness and light,
A whiteness which was light and which was more than light,
And the inner morning and meaning of all light.

Suddenly it was the awe and moment when Adam first looked upon
another self, a self like his own self, yet an absolute
other and newness, being the beginning of being
and love and loving and being loved,

(Then all astonishment rippled to recognition, unbelievable,
Yet actual before him, growing with the certainty, serenity and
majesty of morning).

Quickly and certainly it was the little moment when Lazarus
Thrusting aside the cold seated linens,
Summoned by Jesus, snow and morning,
Thrust the stone to the side, the fell conclusion,

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And knew all astonishment for the first time, wonderstruck

Not that he lived again, after the wood, the stone, the closing, nails,
and black silence empty,

But that he had ever died. Knew the illusion of death
confused with the reality of the agony of dying,

Knowing at last that death is inconceivable among the living

(Knowing the wish, the hope, the will, the luxury and ignorance of
the thought that man can ever die)

Hearing the thunder of the news of waking from the false dream of
life that life can ever end.

223

WINFIELD TOWNLEY SCOTT

How Shall I Ever Come to Any Good?

How shall I ever come to any good
And get my works in schoolbooks if I use
A rough word here and there, but how shall I
Let you know me if I bequeath you only
The several photographs, the family letters?

There is no image of a tired mind
Tired of its own vanity for fame.
I turn in the comfort of the midnight rain
And as much for pleasure as necessity
Piss in the river beyond O'Ryan's bar.

Indian Summer — Buffalo Summer

Opened like a big new colored-picture book,
The morning took us early with the summer wind
Coming over the streets and yards from the harbor.

There was no game good enough for that morning.
By 10 o'clock my mother put on her new shirtwaist
And Aunt Essie was there in her black hat with the cherries.

I ran ahead of them, all the way to the corner
Clutching my cap pistol, ran out of the sun
And climbed a bench in the little park under the walnuts.

It must have been time: on the curbs all fathers and mothers,
Even Miss Pitman and her cane, old Mr. Kaull and his pipe,
Baby Shea, the big policeman, in the middle of Broadway.

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