We’re sick of our men – anyway that part’s right
In that paper from the North,
Sick of them mostly.
Well, the storm’s here now…
An’ what’s a Communist?
An’ what’s a ‘peon’? Wish I knew.
Suppose I asked that new nigger there with the pigs…
Sumpthin’ like: come in an’ tell me, nigger,
Did you help make this earth so red?
Don’t see no blood gone outa you, no –
Kinda handsome too… ugly black… looka them shoulders,
Wow… an’ them ham-hands messin’ up pigs’ food…
Wonder what it’s like to…
Well? Mebbe yeah… Ain’t the house empty?
‘Comme here nigger, say,
Wanta ask you sumpthin’…
Damn fool’s deaf – Here nigger,
What’s your name, ain’t seen you ’bout the place before,
Who’s your master right now?’
‘Massah? Massah boss…’
‘Why ma’am, yuh fo’ sure’.
‘Aw come in nigger, don’t matter ’bout your name,
You’re mine, see? Don’t be scared,
That there’s the rain, not white menfolks
Stompin’ about the house.
I’m ’lone today, see? I’ll treat you good
If you talk to me, git a little frien’ly,
I kinda likes you.
Say, what’s a Communist – heard you bin having some ’roun these parts –
What do they do? And what’s a ‘peon’?
You’re free, ain’ you, though you’re mine too, see?
Becos we protec’ you-all, we like your folk,
But you don’ seem grateful no more…
Jes’ won’t answer, huh?
Mebbe you got sumpthin’ to teach me
An’ I’m a white woman, see?
Thinka that, alone with a big black nigger…
Well, you got sumpthin’ to show me then?
Come on, nigger, I’ll say you gotta give it me…
You damn nigger beast… you won’t?
Well, you raped me anyhow…
We-all know niggers jes’ gotta rape white women –
Looka that! Jumped clean outa the back door! An’ his name’s Roly,
Hick Roly, I knowed it all along –
Your number’s up, Roly
Git what’s comin to you…’
So they took the dogs out, the bloodhounds, an hour later when the men were back,
And they cotched him in the swamps
And what the hounds left they hung on a tree
And plugged it plumb full
And the guns were hot with shooting at it,
And so they went home,
And the lady of the house was honoured,
And they had the moonshine out,
‘Weren’t much of a nigger,
Already half drowned hisself tryin’ to git away,
Not much fight left.’
And the farmer said: ‘Well, goddam,
’Nother nigger ter find fer them pigs,
Not so hahd these days, go git one from camp,
Guess warden owes me sumpthin’ for that las’ keg –
Ain’t going’ to be no fuss about this black stiff,
Jes’ a mess o’ black pieces in the swamp,
Foot-loose nigger ennyway till I took him,
Nobody’s nigger.’
And that was just one more lynching that year
Among the 48 in 1933.
Réanville
For Hadley
Moth and cheese and rust and dung –
(Oh Paris, Paris, Normandy –)
The wordless smell, the curtain hung
Across the years, the five gone by
Under the Boot – the while you play
With myth and moth, and snake, and smell
The unaccounted lactic strain
Rise, music-like, from every fold
That kept the Mowrers from the cold
Such hours they burned their midnight oil
Bent over Teuton deviltry –
I, in French, savage village-cot
Am aureoled with dust and dung
Imbuing now the shining words
Of poets – laid, now cold, now hot
On print, MSS, and letter-love
And twenty years of paper there.
Here is a bead, a mask, a hair
I wore, before the men were shot
In Badajoz, Guernika bombed,
And later thousands felled, entombed
All in a day, now here, now there,
Throughout the world, the roaring world…
Dung is more quiet, French-made dung
Of peasants, laid quite carefully
Upon your book and mine, and left
Till, after months, it have become
part of the book, the history
Of all the world, and you and me –
(And, who can tell, become the key
Of what, though plain, seems mystery…)
‘Death to the intellect’ was roared –
These Norman peasants heard the cry
And oped their breeches and let fly.
The Germans only burned the books,
And played their war and went away –
The peasants shat another day.
And while you shook the curtains yet,
My past, it rose in one great wave,
One giant hour of forty years
Laid flat, ten deep, upon the floor –
And regal rust shone here and there
As sunlight will upon the hair,
And ’bit at foot upon the stair…
No more, no more, NO MORE for me –
For you the curtains shaken clean
Of all the stuff of ‘would have been
Were it not thus’ – but here the hell
Come clean at last, and that race run…
[unreadable], grüss-gott! My garden’s green,
All’s well withal – the war’s begun!
In the Studio
Is it March, spring, winter, autumn, twilight, noon
Told in this distant sound of cuckoo clocks?
Sunday it is – five lilies in a swoon
Decay against your wall, aggressive flocks
Of alley-starlings aggravate a mood.
The rain drops pensively. ‘If one could paint,
Combine the abstract with a certain rude
Individual form, knot passion with restraint…
If one could use the murk that fills a brain
Undo old symbols and beget again
Fresh meaning on dead emblem…’ so one lies
Here timeless, while the lilies’ withering skin
Attests the hours, and rain sweeps from the skies;
The bird sits on the chimney, looking in.
In San Gimignano
For Ernesto Ferri, Musician
On such a day in the doce and trece
Others too will have run to that window crying out
‘Look, look! Here’s all Tuscany blotted with rain,
With mists and a tiny snow… Look!
All Tuscany’s here in a cup of guesses,
In a hood of vision and memory – the proof and the promise.’
‘Music’, said you, ‘what is music?’, you ask me the meaning of music!
Surely if such were knowable it would be something like madness…”
I am sure of your words, Ernesto Ferri, that day.
(The meaning of music – who would think of such a thing but myself?)
But now I am thinking of Dante
On the fabled bridge, of his meeting there with Beatrice;
Yes – and what, do you suppose, is the meaning of love?
How many years have I not thought of this – maybe all life itself –
Of Dante’s meeting, or fabled meeting, on th
at bridge…
Of the vast Italian landscapes with their secrets between the mountains,
The towers and flowers, and the Spring that comes like a giant,
‘Eccome qua’, all in an hour…
Of the toads in their clutch of love, the bull led out curvetting,
Cortona’s masterly spring –
Thinking of the plains and rains, of the wars and the Medioevo,
And Ossoia (‘a place of bones’) and Urbino’s Ostia,
Mysterious, eaten heart, by sublimely-perspective Uccello.
Here with a surge like Giant Spring in his hour,
In the cold curve of winter (that is a point to make)
Ernesto Ferri seizes my hands and shouts
‘Look! Look with me at all of this!’ and we run to the window,
And all we see is mist, yet all we know is there
Cupped and sealed in its coffer of future splendours:
The springs and Mays and morns, in the slender, icy rain
Or snow would it be?) – silent strength in the silent greyness,
Hushed and remote, all the towers taut in the air,
Frozen and fisted.
(Ah me, San Gimignano,
Mai piu, mai piu, mai piu – yet why do I write ‘mai piu’?
Must I break into wars, Ernesto, and conjugate their tenses
That say Mai piu, mai piu – fading out of a ‘chi lo sa’?)
(Oh be this ‘chi lo sa’ today my guerdon,
(Oh be this ‘chi lo sa’ our sorrow’s guardian.)
That day
You played, oh how you played without your violin…
You began with Shelley,
Your words soared into poems and the hands of your maestria
Lept to the corals on my throat, and you touched them
(As did your Aldo), saying it would bring us luck,
Luck to all three, if we could but just toccare
The lovely ‘horallo’ together, and this, all three, we did.
(Meanings live here, it seems, undreamed elsewhere.)
Now, later, I find some eyes that are surely Sienna’s
As limned by the lovely Nelli and his peers in that early time
Such craftsmen have told the story, the poem of cheek and eyelash
Where they come together – and Giotto, with his cowl on the perfect line…
Italy, Italy!
Trampled, resurgent, remembered and pressed to breast,
Like one of the surges in Swinburne, flame-filled in an ice of waiting,
Till the time shall come for the freeing, and now that time is expressed!
Ernesto Ferri, salute! I will soon doff my Swinburne
And turn to the sonnet form, and the earlier, sheerer way;
Look, passionate Galleotti is peaking to Dante,
All love’s told in two lines: ‘We read no further that day’,
‘That day we read no further.’
Such, yes, is the maestria of poetry: all love told in six words:
‘Quel giorno non leggemmo piu avanti’,
With three or four lines before to fill the stage:
A man, a woman, a book – there is not even a tankard
Mentioned to quicken the colour and heighten the pulse and rhythm;
Maybe it was there all the same, tankard before the dagger…
You would play that well, very well indeed, I think
Ernesto Ferri.
June for Italy – June For Freedom
Letter to the Poet Gawsworth most actively there
Then up spoke June 11 on the air;
‘Pursuit…out of Roman country… entering Tuscany now.’
Half Italy’s freed! Tarquinia’s safe,
Stone man and woman on the tombs keep their Etruscan status quo
Viterbo passed (great dome monumented in memory);
What of Orvieto, Signorelli’s Crack of Doom on the great holy walls there?
Grosseto… Orbetello – flowering meads and water flats –
Mars finding foot heavy to run with here…mocked by bull-frogs?
Inland: Spóleto… Montefalco,
(Message for AMG:
The Gozzolis here
Were in very good condition
On their little round hill,
One of those Benozzo did so often
In his frescos incorporate.)
Map? In the heart’s eye only – no other.
Gubbio, it says, Gubbio and the Podestá’s magnificent castle;
Castagni e noci throughout the land here I think,
Maize is festoons on each house, come autumn, for the people’s polenta,
(And for mine too, once more.)
Arezzo? Let Cosroe fight on round the story of the True Cross
Sabre high, battle-axe, masterful headgear, flowering horses;
Piero Francesca painted it, the great mélée of spears and faces.
Borgo San Sepolcro-here Signorelli’s austere pain in the Crucifixion.
I remember ‘u(m)briaco in Umbria’, with the wine almost black,
And how, in one hour, the winter snapped on a hill
And the waters rushed out of Cortona, and Spring said: N o w!
Immensely flushed the plain, quilt and symphony
Pricked out with vines and flowers… Ossoia here,
A Roman time of bones – Trasymene.
San Gimignano – towers, Dante, Benozzo –
Siena of the blue hills, purple, volcanic Volterra.
Send news, send news! –
Of Urbino and the Duke of the Nose and Warts;
San Marino, Rimini, Ravenna,
Bologna, Ferrara… tutti cuanti, tutti cuanti right up to the Lakes.
Orcagna and Gozzoli,
Piero della Francesca and
(Bramantino)
Suardi,
Stay safe.
After the plan made, the drink in council taken, the feet singing together as they go:
March – March March – March March – March March – March March – March,
Neatly and strongly
ON.
Fuori i Tedeschi And down with the Fascists!
Kikuyu
More and more black must the blood run?
Chains tighter round your limbs be strung,
Where some are shot and others hung…
What price all this, since all’s begun?
Kikuyu, Kikuyu, Kikuyu.
‘I see a world without a slave’:
These words may seal our century’s grave.
Aim at the heart, both spend and save
All – now the sign’s come oer the wave,
Visez le ccoeur.
Force stored for spending. Thus prepare,
Cool head, hot heart. The sign? Tis air!
Much premature? Ye here, my dear,
It comes across the wave from there,
Arrow to heart.
Visez le coeur. Who stoned the wind,
That fifty-fifty kind-unkind
Co-traveller? Time out of mind
Twas thee, twas I that stoned the wind.
Now shoot for the heart.
Si tout dévale et tout s’en va,
Les temps hésitent à mettre bas
Leur monstres, un çi et l’autre là;
Rien n’est fini – d’accord sur cela?
Tirez au coeur.
Jaime
‘Here go I but for the grace of God’
Are words as old as true – and what I see
Is this mysterious shape in front of me,
That is nor man, nor eft, nor stone, nor clod –
A cripple, ay, for all eternity.
Nought can repair, nought can restore this thing
Framed by some sudden fit of infancy,
Nor love nor hate, nor devil, king,
Parliament, system, science, not even spring;
All’s done and lost, because of destiny.
It drags itself along as best it
may
In street and bar; some gape and others sneer
At this small mess of bones sprawled on the floor
That’s lifted up while onto a chair
That it with you may pass the time of day.
It utters curious sounds – they’re words, I swear.
Fine head, fine hands – the rest’s a raggle of pain,
A higgle-piggle of broken spillikins
Linked by the snakes. (Indeed the devil wins
Outright, for ever, thus.) It says its name,
(A phantom, it seems, has that, if spawned here):
‘I’m Jaime, Meorquín’. You like his game?
(If game it be). My Lords, this too is Spain.
Late Night Sonnet
For Clyde Robinson, American
‘Echo on echo runs into the past,
Ply over ply the serried memories
Lie on the shore, from bitter first to last,
No one-time rose that bloomed but ever dies…’
‘Come now: Was all of life such a cursed thing,
All of it blasts and gales and fearsome rain,
None of it August-rose, all grudging spring?
Come now, look back, think hard, and look again:
Was most of it a questing from here to Mars,
And all the rest a mass of shards and spars,
And broken loves, and all the rest of that,
All of it cold, all in ‘the rage of Mart’?’
‘Not all, not all, not only – Once I sat
Close to the heat of Spanish hearth and heart.’
Letter
For, and to, John Hayward, From N.
It’s ELIOT now who’s dead – says the lunch-time Radio here, half-heard because of the usual clatter
of forks on plates,
The interruptive chatter…
Eliot
We met, you and I, first, that summer night of 1922,
At a ball – You in ‘smoking’, I in a panniered dress
Selected Poems Page 22
