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I SADIE BIMBERG—that’s her name | |
| Down in Houston Street; | |
| And her brother, Isidore, | |
| With his family—wife, and four— | |
| Lives there now, unknown to fame: | 5 |
| He sells Kosher meat. | |
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| Sadie used to work | |
| In Lasalle’s department store; | |
| Wasn’t thirteen when she started | |
| (White and scrawny, with big eyes | 10 |
| Black and lustrous, and black hair | |
| In two pig-tails tied with red; | |
| Over-tall and under-fed!) | |
| On the dubious ascent | |
| Toward a living wage … But shirk— | 15 |
| Always, from the very first— | |
| All she durst! | |
| Dared to dream she wasn’t meant | |
| To live in a tenement, | |
| Help her mother pay the rent: | 20 |
| “What a foolishness,” thought Sadie, | |
| “I was born to be a lady!” | |
| So a little past sixteen | |
| Sadie disappeared. | |
| “On the streets—that’s where she’ll end,” | 25 |
| Said each reassuring friend | |
| To the little crooked mother | |
| Brooding on a fate she feared. | |
| “Sadie always was that mean!” | |
| Grumbled Isidore, the brother, | 30 |
| Plucking at his silky beard … | |
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II Out from the wings, half-shy, as half-afraid, | |
| Timidly poised as if for startled flight, | |
| Fawn-like she steps, and round her hesitant feet | |
| Lurks the charmed circle of the calcium light. | 35 |
| A moment thus, as by her fears delayed, | |
| She hearkens—dryad!—to the sensuous beat | |
| Of savage rhythms, then half-emboldened sways | |
| A little from the hips, and then more bold, | |
| No longer she delays— | 40 |
| Maenad—but with fierce glee and sensual glance | |
| Lithe, amorous, ecstatic, uncontrolled— | |
| Leaps to the footlights in tempestuous dance. | |
| And they who sit within the darkened hall | |
| Feast quick insatiate eyes and smite their hands | 45 |
| When breathless, brazen, palpitant she stands | |
| Before the curtain for her twentieth call. | |
| Twice daily this her triumph, and she knows | |
| The only world she knows is at her feet!… | |
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| “Mirella” is the name of Broadway’s rose: | 50 |
| They called her Sadie down in Houston Street. | |
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