Exodus
Exodus lay under an oak-tree
Bordering on Buda Pest he had lain
him down to over-night under the lofty rain
of starlight
having leapt from the womb
eighteen years ago and grown
neglected along the shores of the Danube
on the Danube in the Danube
—or breaking his legs behind runaway horses—
with a Carnival quirk
every Shrove Tuesday
Of his riches
a Patriarch
erected a synagogue
— —for the people
His son
looked upon Lea
— — of the people
she sat in Synagogue
—her hair long as the Talmud
—her tamarind eyes— —
and disinherited
begat this Exodus
Imperial Austria taught the child
the German secret patriotism
the Magyar tongue the father
stuffed him with biblical Hebrew and the
seeds of science exhorting him
to vindicate
his forefather’s ambitions
The child
flowered precociously fever
smote the father
the widowed mother
took to her bosom a spouse
of her own sphere
and hired
Exodus in apprenticeship
to such as garrulously inarticulate
ignore the cosmic cultures
Sinister foster-parents
who lashed the boy
to that paralysis of
the spiritual apparatus
common to
the poor
The arid gravid
intellect of jewish ancestors
the senile juvenile
calculating prodigies of Jehovah
—Crushed by the Occident ox
they scraped
the gold gold golden
muck from off its hoofs—
moves Exodus to emmigrate
coveting the alien
asylum of voluntary military
service paradise of the pound-stirling
where the domestic Jew in lieu
of knouts is lashed with tongues
The cannibal God
shutters his lids of night on the day’s gluttony
the partially devoured humanity
warms its unblessed beds with bare prostrations
An insect from an herb
errs on the man-mountain
imparts its infinitesimal tactile stimulus
to the epiderm to the spirit
of Exodus
stirring the anaesthetised load
of racial instinct frustrated
impulse infantile impacts with unreason
on his unconscious
Blinking his eyes— — —
at sunrise Exodus
lumbar-aching sleep logged turns his ear
to the grit earth and hears
the boom of cardiac cataracts
thumping the turf
with his young pulse
He is undone! How should he know
he has a heart The Danube
gives no instruction in anatomy—
the primary
throb of the animate
a beating mystery
pounds on his ignorance
in seeming
death dealing—
The frightened fatalist
clenches his eyes
for the involuntary sacrifice
stark
to the sun-zumm dirges of
a bee
he lays him out
for his heart-beats to slay him
It is not accomplished
the burning track
of lengthening sun shafts
spur
This lying-in-state of a virility
to rise
and in his surprised
protracted viability
shoulder his pack
Exodus whose initiations
in arrogance through brief
stimulation of his intellect
in servitude through early
ill-usage etch involute
inhibitions
upon his sensibility
sharpened and blunted he
—bound for his unformulate
conception of life—
makes for the harbour
and the dogged officer of Destiny
kept Exodus
and that which he begat
moving along
The highest paid tailor’s
cutter in the “City”
Exodus Lord Israel
nicknamed from his consummate bearing
his coaly eye
challenging the unrevealed universe
speaking fluently “business-English”
to the sartorial world
jibbering stock exchange quotations
and conundrums of finance
to which unlettered immigrants are instantly
initiate
Those foreigners
before whom the soul
of the new Motherland
stands nakedly incognito
in so many ciphers
In the boarding-house the lady with
the locket “You will excuse me— —
Our Dear Queen picks chicken bones in
her fingers” Exodus at leisure
painting knowing not why
sunflowers turned sunwards
Sundays when
England closed the eyes of every
commercial enterprise
but the church and spewed
her silent servants out of her areas
in their bi-weekly “best” to
“Ow get along with you” their lurching lovers
along the rails of parks
The high-striped soldiers of the swagger-stick
tempting the wilder flowers of womanhood
to lick-be-quick ice cream
outside the barracks
This jovian hebrew “all dressed up
and nowhere to go”
stands like a larch
upon the corners of incarcerate streets
deploring the anomalous legs
of Zion’s sons
with the subconscious
irritant of superiority
left in an aristocacy out of currency
paces
the cancellated desert of the metropolis
with the instinctive urge of loneliness
to get to “the heart of something”
The heart of England
sporting its oak
on the rude ratepayer
Hymns ancient and modern
belabour crippled cottage-grands
in parlour fronts
A thrush
shatters its song upon the spurious shade
of a barred bird-fancier’s
The dumb philosophies
of the wondering jew
fall into rhythm with
long unlistened-to hebrew chants
A wave
“out of tide” with the surrounding
ocean he breaks
insensitized non-participance upon himself
(The) unperceived
conqueror of a new world
in terms of cutting and drafting
Exodus lifts his head
over the alien crowds
under the alien clouds
proudly as memory
evokes the panic-stricken
discoverer of his own heart coming
barefoot to the Synagogue
erected by his grandfather — — —
The Rabbi said “Your grandfather
was a great and a just man
we reap what he has sown
— honoured be his memory so here’s
your fare third class
May the God of Israel
bless thee among the Gentiles”
And the God of the Gentiles
blessed him among Israel
he had several
shares in the
