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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Marya Zaturensky

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Song of a Factory Girl

Marya Zaturensky

From “Spinners”

IT’S hard to breathe in a tenement hall

So I ran to the little park,

As a lover runs from a crowded ball

To the moonlit dark.

I drank in clear air as one will

Who is doomed to die,

Wistfully watching from a hill

The unmarred sky.

And the great trees bowed in their gold and red

Till my heart caught flame;

And my soul, that I thought was crushed or dead,

Uttered a name.

I hadn’t called the name of God

For a long time;

But it stirred in me as the seed in sod,

Or a broken rhyme.