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 south-wind'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 mourners 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.
