| |
| IN the smoke-blue cabaret | |
| She sang some comic thing: | |
| I heeded not at all | |
| Till “Sing!” she cried, “Sing!” | |
| So I sang in tune with her | 5 |
| The only song I know: | |
| “The doors shall be shut in the streets, | |
| And the daughters of music brought low.” | |
| |
| Her eyes and working lips | |
| Gleamed through the cruddled air— | 10 |
| I tried to sing with her | |
| Her song of devil-may-care. | |
| But in the shouted chorus | |
| My lips would not be stilled: | |
| “The rivers run into the sea, | 15 |
| Yet the sea is not filled.” | |
| |
| Then one came to my table | |
| Who said, with a laughing glance, | |
| “If that is the way you sing, | |
| Why don’t you learn to dance?” | 20 |
| But I said: “With this one song | |
| My heart and lips are cumbered— | |
| ‘The crooked cannot be made straight, | |
| Nor that which is wanting, numbered.’ | |
| |
| “This song must I sing, | 25 |
| Whatever else I covet— | |
| Hear the end of my song, | |
| Hear the beginning of it: | |
| ‘More bitter than death the woman | |
| (Beside me still she stands) | 30 |
| Whose heart is snares and nets, | |
| And whose hands are bands.’” | |
| |
