Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

Mirella Dances

Lee Wilson Dodd

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:

He sells Kosher meat.

Sadie used to work

In Lasalle’s department store;

Wasn’t thirteen when she started

(White and scrawny, with big eyes

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—

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:

“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,”

Said each reassuring friend

To the little crooked mother

Brooding on a fate she feared.

“Sadie always was that mean!”

Grumbled Isidore, the brother,

Plucking at his silky beard …

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.

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—

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

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!…

“Mirella” is the name of Broadway’s rose:

They called her Sadie down in Houston Street.