Of scorn and sweet ran hot and chill,
The spring of 1938
Marched, and the omens boded ill.
Sophisticate of simple man,
All’s one; fate nears with drilling feet –
Oh shambles shambles of the heart,
‘How fares in there? The world’s in it’.
The world, cross-currented, a-glow,
Identified that while with you…
We ate our lotus there a month –
‘No other taste shall change this…’ No?
No other taste? Deliverer time
Writhes in the bud and waits the spring.
But lovers’ bird a phoenix is,
Half-crazed with hope; on dazzling wing
It rides the flurry of the Horn –
Think you we’ll round those furious tides?
The look-out man still calls: She rides!
Hush on his daring until port.
When’s that, and where – Volubilis?
How comes to me a name like this,
Lure with same nothing at the end,
Stage on the road I-hit-I-miss?
* * * * * *
Volubilis stands yet on sand
In Africa with its Roman twist
That time wrecked too, that death has kissed –
Ay, that’s the lotus never-land.
Sequences from a Long Epic on Spain
1
It begins in Morocco, under the long-depressed Crescent,
With a voice in the night: ‘Turn out! Manoeuvres!’
And the Moors took
The usual dawn-roads and then – it all got different.
‘Had we but known…for there are paths between the Moroccos;
We could have fled, but we did not know.’
Ordered into planes, this, German, that, Italian,
Moors into Spain marched, gun at rib, wondering;
And came
‘Into lands of Spain, si señor, us, Regulares.
They told us then: ‘Fair in Seville; you, Guard of Honour’.
The devil a fair! But threats, blows and secrecy incomprehensible;
A train, a train and a train, and no place with a name, for us.
Then in two weeks
Crashed doubt into truth: WAR. But whose war? Now we know.
We are not prisoners. We are deserters to the Republic;
Walked from that place of many arches (Segovia), a woman showed us the way.’
Oh Moors of earnest word – you five I saw later in Madrid.
2
It begins, for me, in a Montmarte street with a crazy footstep
Racing, pleading, at midnight: ‘I must talk to someone, you…
Listen, woman: if you know how close it is,
The horror…Can you stop it? I am an airman; I fell.
It is not that. They’ll use me tomorrow again,
And I’ll go wherever it be; I’m a commercial flier.
That is not it.
I saw my brother burn in the sky; I was a child,
Near Verdun, near Verdun – 1918.
Planes fall, burning. I know hell. Do you know hell?
And not it’s coming again…
If you knew, if you knew – so soon – or do you know?
Gone with the wind of Ethiopia-laden July,
A scar of a man. What was it, foreknowledge, coincidence?
And then, in four days, in a roar of flames it began.
19 ------ Barcelona ------- 19, immortal July.
Madrid 1936
I cannot see the landscape for the tears,
But winter has come with snow in the new craters there.
They have died and died in Madrid, perhaps mainly the children;
Look at their pictures, peoples, observe the virtuosity
Of death, the pock-signer, the master in fanciful sameness –
Behold this singular leprosy,
This hither-and-yon of destruction that needs no one wound;
The children’s mouths are open in death,
Is it suspense? No, a finality.
What is the answer to come?
PEOPLES, WHAT IS YOUR ANSWER?
It is winter in the round still parks,
Snow and misery are the temporary new crutches of death –
Only, over the snow fly the words of all Europe now…
Words from the Pacific Americas, words of Antillean temper,
Coming together, comrades – words from Finland to Abyssinia;
The scale fills in, the octave is complete.
They are all here
For Paco, with Paco the espadrilled, once the hod-carrier, now Spain’s Red Army man.
Words of men, deeds of men – men here and coming,
Grain cast out of the great seed-bag of man’s heart,
Ready seed sown, fallen, moving, risen and proven.
This is the International, Paco – this too is a finality.
December 1936, Madrid
By the Manzanares,
And the Parque del Oeste and the Casa del Campo,
By the Puetra de Hierro and the Hill of the Partridges,
University City… Casa de las Flores… Quixote and Pancha in the snow,
(Their statue a front now)…Carabanchél…
By the shards of the southern wasteland,… Arguélles,. Vallécas,
Líria’s Palace in rivers of flame…
By the Puente de los Franceses, by the Southern Station,
Cuatro Caminos, Tetuán (the air bursting with death)…
By Úsera, Araváca, Garabítas,
by Las Véntas, Monclóa, Lavapiés,
B a t t l e.
If the poets be not dead – but what matter if the poets be dead –
Nothing matters but Madrid in its winter of death and dying –
Yet the poets were not dead; they came, anguished, wondering, and erect
Men of Madrid and women, and children on road and street
Taught what a clenched fist means when what is in it is truth.
* * * * * *
– Things in the sky, things broken, hunger afoot ever earlier, how many statues in twain?
I cannot compute the bodies, cannot compass the dead.
And one day
Came from the sky this, a present to the earth:
Journalist’s despatch, November something: ‘Witnessed today
opening of box dropped over Madrid by parachute of Francoist
plane. Contents, horribly mutilated body. Carved-up corpse of
Republican aviator. Obviously work of professional butcher.
Note attached: “We will serve all your fliers in like manner.”’
His name was Juan Antonio Galarza.
December 1937, Madrid
They did not pass – through Toledo Gate where only the sunset passes,
(I have seen I have seen)
With the final Bmmmmm-p of hand grenades, beholding the smoky battle.
‘Not for us, those’, said the sentry there. ‘Now tell us of Major Attlee
Who came here a week ago. Is he true? If so, what will he do for us?’
…And the smoky battle,
Smudged, an uncertain fresco; how far – a mile? Less than two,
Under Madrid in the snow and gold of December.
Florída, Gran Vía, Telefónica,
Street of Shells, pride of edifices;
Noon a-freeze, then the windy blackout, the deserted midnight,
The moon in a hollow tooth – such, once, were houses –
(Oh heart like a scarlet opal, who shall tell you as befits you?
Men and statues have fallen, a year has passed – but they did not pass.)
The Exodus from Catalonia – Republican Spain walks into
France – Jan-Feb 1939
For these
France was a virgin field, a page open, ready
To write G r a t i t u d e on, a field for the ploughing-under of pain,
A piece of calm after agony; they came as a gift here;
And so the flocks came, besides the gold and the cars and the chariots defeated in hell –
But mostly came the hearts of men.
What was this frontier, tell me?
A pass for flocks,
A transient mile between those final rocks,
A strangulation with a shining end,
Hell’s funnel –
So they saw it, waiting 10,000 deep each day to climb their gehenna.
Somewhere, sometime, between bristled sabres and stamping platoons,
Peace! After the chesty sergeants and General Staff’s barking orders across their way,
Rest!
And the Sister Republic answered:
‘We hate you’.
If these frontier things must be, they thought, next hours must bring
That change when man becomes man again with his lamb at his side,
On the green of earth resting, under an almost Spanish sun.
Climbing gehenna they thought:
Aren’t we seres humanos – beings, human?
But the frontier – what is a frontier?
‘Give us arms to fight or let us in’ said the old man trudging down back to Spain,
Telling me: ‘Back to Junquera! Turned back!!
What means a ‘frontier’? This! Now we search the ground
For any piece of food that might have dropped when we passed before –
Back to Junquera for ‘permits’ – to enter what? France!
That is what this frontier means: a line at the end of starvation,
30 and more months of death, treacheries… all that has been…
72 am I. I was mayor of my place
In Asturias, and many a foul deed have I known,
But this, such as this, never! It is inconceivable.
All night we stood on that line, the ‘frontier’, in the roar of the rain;
I saw a woman give birth on the road, an old man die,
– Something like 3,000 of us there – people fainting, gangrene growing in wounds…
And now they turn us back. We are looking for food at our feet.
Have you seen anything one could eat? What should we do – ay, what shall we do?’
I have seen I have seen
All this poor woof and weave, this drapery of exodus
Rotted with rain in one night here, transposed into compost,
A fit bed for the conqueror – along with one pale dead ass,
Les quatre fers en l’air, death’s humble and monstrous belly;
Seen many a foul deed done, heard the hearts of men break,
Seen the blood of Spain’s truth run dark – but no waste scrap of food.
‘It is not right, compañero – they are mad in France, compañero,
Because it’s coming to them the same tide;
We should have fought it till victory, we by their side –
But now, back to Junquera, with no crumb of food…’
Is there pardon for France and Franco in this in a mile of centuries?
The triumph of hell nears completion. A whole people has walked away.
The Lands That Were Today
To Kay Boyle
Ah listen, mark – the Devil’s sick again.
It is night; it is Radio; it is the Danzig brew;
Noise of rushing rabble, shingle by arrogant sea,
Hush, hush, the demagogue’s rampant.
How interesting, hideous but interesting, the noise of it all,
The key-drop, the holy tear in the voice between hiccups to Mars,
The down-slide, the mad uprush.. ‘Humanität’.. the orchestration.
it’s lasted…’ Begeisterung am Menschen’ … already one hour –
Here in Normandy
The stooks are set, the men gone in their millions to the East.
‘Sie wissen hier genau’ – oh voice of Devil-never-Fausted-with-doubt –
We do, genau we do – the land that was Heine and Goethe.
Do not cut off the man’s voice, pray, with your sticks to the fire,
Plague on your cooking-clatter; listen: a dictator bursts.
I am thinking: ‘After the countries, he killed himself; yes, he could try that,
But that is not enough; nothing can be enough.’
… The land that was… Today ‘finalism’ without meaning.
On the wings of wine I am thinking, thinking, thinking,
Past-present-future, of something that will not go into words.
Tears have told it, tears buried with blood in revenge pendent in Italy,
Something…how does it go…something like a quotation:
‘How long, how long,
Dictator’s stamping-ground the people’s breast?’
What do we know of war? We know there is some kind of war,
Cynical, covert, cold, censored, a wraith-war, leashed holocausts,
There in men’s East – but here, later, with lilacs, acacias,
Plaited round batteries, snapped – bleeding spring over corpses, over one I knew?
My village, my lovely land, my bit of eternal France…
Listen, tune in again, for the set is ending:
‘Three years, says Britain. I, Hitler, answer, seven!
Siegheil!’ (Oh their raucous hall and their gruff teutonic band)
And that is that,
and…
And then the Gallic cock lifted his spur
And the old lion woke out of his cynic rheums
And shook his claws, brushed fur and came alive again.
And all the tense driven pageantry of Empire got under way,
And we are forty now that knew the day
They killed Edward, Patrick, Raymond, Ivo, and my lover
In such fields’ corners that are less England ever than is a stoop of mull by September stove –
Ay, it begins again, but it is different, for there are wars, and more, between;
And I have seen, I have seen,
Lived part of one, and shall again, I know;
And been
Where truth haunts rock and stone immortally round a people strong in the thigh;
I have seen them fight, and the fear of their truth used as order that they should die.
And now, dead men of England, lend me your ears
By the autumn stove, and from your timeless close,
Your chartless regions and unknowable spheres,
Communicate, pass by, or whisper what no man knows:
Is Humanity inching along? Is it ‘Now’, is it ‘Not in our time’?
We are at one on it all – we are at one I suppose…
Journey to the New World
You, mijito, my son, my lover, my son,
You are free now, free…you that went to kill bulls in Avila
And found the priests with their guns there, the black snake with its head up.
You are free – free to grieve still, but free to live again too.
We have left Europe, changed the North Star for the Southern Cross.
Look! Here it all begins. It begins at Mendoza,
After the weary wonder of the Pampas in the Argentine’s dustrobe –
We drank beer without cease crossing them, thought of nothing as far as that’s possible…
Look! Here it begins. We are in it. It has begun.
What does it mean, this note scribbled in the crazy car
Curvetting through a grey dawn, these words: ‘The two passes – Exodus?’
I remember – the Pass of death, the Pyrenean; the Pass to life, the Andes;
The Andes, the Andes, the Andes – that is a name for life.
And then:
‘Desprecio a la palabra en Europa, a la possia, a la verdad’.
You are eloquent my notes of that morning, you say further
(Of the sea-journey and arrival) ‘It begins and it ends in colours,
Colour of se
a in a hostile land, the white on the gray.’
Seven days anchored, waiting the convoy in the mouth of the Gironde,
Frozen, benighted, spectral, raging, inarticulate –
Two hours at noon – for a painter, the white on the gray;
But for a poet, these: crispation, paralysis.
Ay, the end of France was the itch and the histoires de géndarmes,
A meet end, with its passes and permits, to a life there of twenty years.
Start of the passage to the New World, the note says:
‘Exit, suspended in pallor, pastels, Impressionists.’
We had Life-Belt and Life-Boat drill one day, the crew with gasmasks,
A paternal captain and 172 scared Portuguese emigrants;
We had Lisbon at coaling-time, the black devils enacting hell
With their spades and buckets, and the roar of the coal down the shute;
Cents a day for this, 20. We had Casablanca, Dakar,
Arab misery, giant Senegal, with Goree, past womb of pain;
Here the slaves came in their coffles, from here was ‘the Middle Passage’ –
Today the old fort, the Slave-House, at last it is empty.
Dakar, foul with colonial purport, resplendent with Negro strength.
Days and more days – then the Equator,
A lake of milk and mirages and birds that were flying fish.
We had Rio – oh New World, you first at Rio…
Went ashore in a blast of Carnival, devoured you, adored you;
And Santos – oh harbours and tropics in a beauty that never ends.
And in Montevideo, friends, and the colours of Spain-my-Spain;
Another colour: waters of the Rio Plata before Buenos Aires;
It is the opal again, but a tawny and turbid opal, not that of Madrid.
The car – it is in the Andes now, and the note staggers:
Selected Poems Page 16
