en--when needles move more slowly on the cloth
And sweaty fingers slacken
And hair falls in damp wisps over the eyes--
Sped by some power within,
Sadie quivers like a rod...
A thin black piston flying,
One with her machine.

She--who stabs the piece-work with her bitter eye
And bids the girls: "Slow down--
You'll have him cutting us again!"
She--fiery static atom,
Held in place by the fierce pressure all about--
Speeds up the driven wheels
And biting steel--that twice
Has nipped her to the bone.

Nights, she reads
Those books that have most unset thought,
New-poured and malleable,
To which her thought
Leaps fusing at white heat,
Or spits her fire out in some dim manger of a hall,
Or at a protest meeting on the Square,
Her lit eyes kindling the mob...
Or dances madly at a festival.
Each dawn finds her a little whiter,
Though up and keyed to the long day,
Alert, yet weary... like a bird
That all night long has beat about a light.

The Gentile lover, that she charms and shrews,
Is one more pebble in the pack
For Sadie's mother,
Who greets him with her narrowed eyes
That hold some welcome back.
"What's to be done?" she'll say,
"When Sadie wants she takes...
Better than Bennie with his Christian woman...
A man is not so like,
If they should fight,
To call her Jew..."

Yet when she lies in bed
And the soft babble of their talk comes to her
And the silences...
I know she never sleeps
Till the keen draught blowing up the empty hall
Edges through her transom
And she hears his foot on the first stairs.

Sarah and Anna live on the floor above.
Sarah is swarthy and ill-dressed.
Life for her has no ritual.
She would break an ideal like an egg for the winged thing at the core.
Her mind is hard and brilliant and cutting like an acetylene torch.
If any impurities drift there, they must be burnt up as in a clear flame.
It is droll that she should work in a pants factory.
--Yet where else... tousled and collar awry at her olive throat.
Besides her hands are unkempt.
With English... and everything... there is so little time.
She reads without bias--
Doubting clamorously--
Psychology, plays, science, philosophies--
Those giant flowers that have bloomed and withered, scattering their seed...
--And out of this young forcing soil what growth may come--
what amazing blossomings.

Anna i