That morning start with the boot, oe’r harrow and furrow
Of yesterdays and yester-years, with ills
All incommensurable for all the pills…
Po’ you, po’ me…’
Pipe down, and try to sleep;
Naught can be done, forever, against tomorrow.
Pain Sonnets
1
I think I know what they sang in those old halls:
One man, maybe, had a stringent stance on PAIN,
Caused by no viper’s lance, but by arrow-rain
Down-hurtling on man and horse and fields and walls
In the fire hither-and-you of battle’s rage.
Leaving out fear, his theme may have been sheer PAIN,
What it will do to a leg, and, ay, to a brain,
In its strange upsurge and decrease on the self-same page
Of one, day, perhaps. Till, like a setting sun
Enveloping all in its purple agony,
Came PAIN again – now in black ecstasy –
To lord and vassal, both, and both were done.
I think that one, maybe, mayhave thought of such:
A lone, tired man. Of his kind there were not much.
2
Be a thing said for once and all, then never again:
Be it said sharp, sheer, and neat, then never again,
And alone, on one single string of a violin
Before the full chords of pain come mounting in,
In their majestic surge, their inexplicable wonder,
Their strange plush-colours, their algebra, their thunder
Around the wound, up-rising from bone to brain,
Their mathematics and their calculations,
Their strangely Arab designs and Turkish fashions…
Where goes all this, while the sow-slow passing days
Hold down bad blood beneath their heavy finger?
Stamp well on the ground then, man, both deep and well;
Stamp fast, then slow, on pain, and then again,
Man, if thou cans’t!
3
Interminable length of winter afternoon!
Man flat of his back, cupped in a swathe of pain,
Thinking of much or of nought. All’s one in such hours,
A-drowse would be best, till that vision of arrow-rain
Shocked him awake, with its ‘All’s to be done again’.
‘How to fight on, when a good three-quarter lost
Seems of my battle now, in this furious game
Of life? Let me think! No, think I cannot today…
Yet that last quarter, bound to be wind-tossed,
Even it, in the rain-borne hours, shall I hold it, say,
To mould it as I would wish, till its brief while
Expire at last on that vast, impressive pile,
That growing mound of all the centuries?
Not likely’s that!’
Stripling
‘None knows enough, for all speak in foreign tongues’,
A new-come stripling then sang, ‘and yet time runs
From its unknown bud to continuity’.
We saw those arrows fall on your walls today
As we approached. All was twixt hell and well,
For you, then them, then you. Indeed, amain,
The battle wheel turned fast. It will turn again,
We know for sure – When-where no one can tell.
But there are finer things within my strings!
I am of tomorrow, today and yesterday.
What do you think it means when music rings
Its hammers upon the anvils of poetry?
My curse be on your roses and your slings,
The devilish pair, the flowers atop the words,
The unknowable roots, then the outburst of swords!
One thing called ‘End’ shall come to us all one day…
And death to all wars as well, for ever and aye.”
To Professor Bernelot Moens
Race hatreds and prejudices are to be conquered by comprehension and appreciation of the character and intellect of the diverse peoples of the world. Only then will these injustices be wiped out. This is the theme of Professor Bernelot Moens, the famous anthropologist. The ‘Dutch Darwin’ classifies humanity throughout the ages as follows: Primitive man, civilised man, humanised man, cultured man, perfect man. He has created the concept of the Supra-Nation, beyond delimitation of nationality. This is the condition-to-be of perfect man – in the future. It is a plan of his that the ‘Supra-Nation’ shall cruise round the world. May it be a cruisade as well to abolish class prejudices and voice the demands of Science for a ‘One world’ terrestrial sphere, for the good of the entire population of the world.
Primitive, conscious, civilised, cultured – blood
Of the world in fusion to make perfect man;
Races are equal; this, the future’s plan…
Between the proving skulls he’d passed, now stood
At gaze upon the nations’ wars and rages.
Time weaves the white with yellow, brown and red
Despite the hatchets round the mating-bed,
The rank battalions of the Saxon sages.
The Supra-Nation crests the racial seas,
Docks in new sunset splendours, where the great
Banquet transcendent science that no State
May triumph over. Yet, my friend, what frees
The peon’s hands that raised the warrior’s shield,
The loin-clothed coolie in the paddy-field?
To Douglas Cooper from Nancy Cunard
Lines inspired by his 1964 New Year’s Card
All that I ask of the years: no fuss, no fuss!
Nor will there ever be twixt you and me,
For both can ask, and get, from each of us,
The wherewithal of continuity.
Old Year, New Year, all’s one and the same to me.
Dear man, this nineteen hundred and sixty-four,
What is it but a knock upon the door
Of part-surprise, part-probability?
Must we have fears, and can we plan at all…
You think we’ll dribble to some ‘dying fall’
The poet wrote of? No, nor you nor I
Will wanton, aimless, between sea and sky:
You, with you splendid gift of hither-and-yon,
Your sabidurìa (knowledge), and your taste –
You think such things do ever go to waste?
No, we shan’t drip into some ‘dying fall’.
You, you’ll drive on, battling against the hosts
Of those who’d turn the artists into ghosts
With no esteem but irony; you’ll talk,
Ever, I fancy, as easy as others walk,
Along some carefree lea.
I shall go on, I think, writing always
About the Spain of yore, wherein my days
Burst into life, a-listen, and so thus saw
What never again shall be no more, no more…
Thus in some strange, yet inexplored bud,
Tomorrow may rise into erect manhood…
Amid the dust and valour of what blood?
For Douglas Cooper
With the postcard of Eze-la-Vieille, La Haute, et même la Hautaine
A castle in all its ruins, behold, behold…
Cut out snake-lizard of the promontory,
See sea as sky, its importance will then stand up
Despite the wrack of century on century,
Importance and impotence well matched together…
Ah mon ami, mon frère, what to do with Time’s weather?
Passport to Freedom
France
Some truths flame, incandesce – others like the blue
Deep of the timeless fiord, or fires seen through husk of ice,
Wait. Truth is hate. This is France. No other necessity’s
Afoot in the corn, in the coal-mine, erect on the castle at Saver
ne
In the full of the banished Tricolor, the one put back there.
France is married to grief, bears grief’s brood, is grief’s cold widow;
The name of her peace is ‘death’. This, after the breaking of the pulses
The heart staggered, the brain convulsed, the nerves paralysed.
Somewhere in it all remained the empty zero hour –
Hate enters the zero hour; good. This womb shall bear life again.
Who is hate? She has made him her only lover,
Single in purpose as a magic; as luminous, as multiple as star-dust.
Hate like a little familiar animal has the freedom of the house,
The freedom of road and city. There is hate in a sou,
Hate in a crumb, in the grinding of tram-wheels,
In the vin du bistro, and the mumbling monologue,
Hate in a harlot’s shoe, in the priest’s breviary leaves,
In the oil greasing a lathe, and the cobbler’s broken awl.
Hate backwards and forwards, in the axles turning and all their echoes,
In the May Day muguet and the iron flowers of November,
Hate in leaves fallen and in red buds to come,
in the breeze and the frost and the pool, in all the dying and renewing,
Hate climbing the curve of the circle –
Look, look, how the womb fills – like a moon approaching the full.
Italy
I
I wonder – is Benozzo still a-flower,
And does the spring still mount the Umbrian hill…
History, a plain, and Italy the tower
That dominates; this is high tide of ill.
Tyrants before; feuds; daggers turning grey
Conspiracies to scarlet; tyrants now;
The Roman worker on the Appian way
Bowed but resilient; hunger’s broken plow
Driven across the land. Their Trasymene,
Your Abyssinia. Soldiers, peasants, men,
Stifled, with raging hearts, that wait the day
To hurl their satrap from the outraged scene.
They will not spare when answer rings to: ‘When?’
This blood comes first – then all their flowers of May.
II
Fiorelli… hilltops…blue of the hyacinth
Under Orvieto, and Cortona’s spring;
The cow is led to her curvetting king;
Gone, winter’s shrouds; and in the ruined plinth
Valerian reddens – Time bears on its bones,
River-deliverer – and the rain’s spears
Are conquerors turned to lovers; April bears
While the gold stonecrop’s busy in the stones.
In the year’s firstness, prima vera. This
Perennial mystery I see not more
Doubtful than is your change – your change not less
Certain than is that fury on the shore,
That fact of waves tides’ ultimates express,
Risen, like you, from shall be, to: it is.
III
Tomorrow is Matteotti, and all those dead.
Tomorrow: the dead Rossellis, and all the slain.
Tomorrow: my Giacomelli – you that were Spain
Too, fought you not for her? Ay, in one bed
Our wills for her together one moment lay,
With the black night’s rifles for their mating song.
Tomorrow: Nitti, and the martyr’s throng –
Ah dead and living, how you shall fill that day.
Dante, long gone. But Dante, eternal you,
Wrote: ‘Italy’s tomorrow, rich and free
And all-resounding’, and the prophecy
Out of this keep of pain and wrath shines true.
Oh dual Janus of the conflicting hours,
Your swords lie in the ground beneath your flowers.
Russia – The U.S.S.R.
I see a man standing sharp against the skyline, a woman on the horizon,
Born in a vast October, guarding the East and West of life.
It is here they say: ‘No citadel we cannot take in the end.’
Was it Lenin? It is all. This is the U.S.S.R.;
The giant’s come of age in the blood bath; The giant arms him hurricanes
Of driving steel, and with little snowflakes
So close, so close – and so unending; arms him with emptiness,
Hunger and the burnt acreage of near-infinity,
With great leaders, partisans, galloping heroes,
With moujik wickedness, with Death’s inexhaustible tricks –
Ah, Death’s both Slav and Tartar.
The giant slept so long in the world, awakened in Russia;
You had forgotten his name – his old simple name which is: Truth.
He stirs,
And the false-measure half-tone vices fall way.
He moves,
And between YES and NO pass the armies of pristine values.
He stands,
And a forest of hands sweeps towards him; not a race lacking.
He arms,
He is Truth fully armed now – millennium is on its way.
Vnoushenie, inspiration – you giant that gives us our life again.
All of the agony is going to turn into something else
When the time is won to turn.
It is then we shall honour our dead and our martyrs
With revenge, and with tears eternal as amber; then will we drink to them
With laughter too, knowing they will be seeing us, having helped us,
Knowing they will want it so, ordering our laughter:
Laughter, comforting scarlet of strength, plenty, comradeship.
BUT TODAY
The only red’s on the snow: bayonet red.
The next colour, they’ll call it: Peace. Let us wish it: World’s peace,
MIR Y POBIEDA
Peace and Victory
Spain
Now – remember the Heart.
Not much is known of it,
For so the heart is and was ever, not much known about.
Write…of little water drops making a river
And the river sub-terrene, the fuller for the damming.
Write…of revolt and revenge, and waiting,
Of planning and the sporadic golpe de mano on the mountain,
Truck-train of munitions for Germany blown up,
The anonymous dead, here and there, its import a very hinge
But the event furled into itself, the cosecha later
When whatever year it be orders the harvest.
Write of the Heart – they’ll understand you, the Spaniards will.
This land
Is a palimpsest – is it not –
Scored over and over with pain,
And with strength furrowed, and hammered with endeavour.
An example
Of how waiting tempers the coming sword.
Here nothing is lost – no vagueness, no compromise
In the plain straight line of things
As they should be – and will be.
Numantium –
That pain is gone, passed into time’s earth
With Cervantes to fight it again. (Oh Father Ebro,
And a skull-full of Romans, and the Numantian fury.)
Done, it is over. A.D. 150. But the temper of it’s left:
Resistance, Death: palimpsest. Spain is guerrilla
Into the hills gone, where no guardia can follow,
Nature and man – rock and Spain – as ever united here.
Not the crafty Nazi,
Nor the mechanised hysteria of machines
Reduces. And if the iron rain come again?
You cannot put out a volcano with dynamite.
You will want to look back on that war – see it as a ridge
Blocking capture – without arms much – very high,
And the city of Madrid, the heart, the fortaleza,
/>
Wall of the world, rampart against the Fascist tide.
See it as hunger and the unheated room
With the Castilian wind through the winter shell-holes there,
The drawn, thin face, the gaunt, crazy meal,
Sandbags and cold – the bean in all its nakedness.
Battle without weapon,
Battle with starvation,
Battle against treachery –
Now, battle of waiting.
It is not necessary, as elsewhere it is necessary
To send the message along: ‘The country will rise again’;
They need no trumpets they whose being is the whole of this.
We’re a long way from all of that here now…
And then, a pair of eyes burning in a pub one night:
Led the British in the I.Bs. then
Yes, time is a train,
Our train, and we know it, Sam, will conquer the longest track…
A long long way from the inspiration here now
This London ’42’s October, yet here is a brand,
You, travelling fire, camarada: I name you, Sam Wild.
Germany
Dedicated to John Heartfield
1
Öd und leer
Eine wüste –
Bavarian dreamer where are you today?
‘In Dachau, Buchenwald – bin Moorsoldat,
A soul on a moor where Death and Time are warders.
A soul? With a body forsooth; the body, a ball and chain
Dragged until out by order of the bullet
Or torture in the hideous dawn or the last vesperal flogging.
Knife, lash and hatchet:
See the scutcheon of the Herrenvolk.
Once this was a human land,
An old grey green river between castled vineyards and legends,
Selected Poems Page 19
