Summer has fallen asleep, it drones, and a grey veil
Is drawn across the bright face of the day;
A shadow vaults a bush, so my dog growls,
Shedding its petals one by one, a late flower stands
Naked and half-alive. I hear the sound
Of a withered apricot-bough crack overhead
To sink of its own weight slowly to the ground.
Oh and the garden too prepares for sleep, its fruit
Proffered to the heavy season of the dead.
It is getting dark. Late too, a golden bee
Is flying a death-circle around my head.
And as for you, young man, what mode of death awaits you?
Will a shot hum like a beetle toward your heart,
Or a loud bomb rend the earth so that your body
Falls limb from limb, your young flesh torn apart?
In sleep the garden breathes. I question it in vain.
Though still unanswered, I repeat it all.
The noonday sun still flows in the ripe fruit
Touched by the twilight chill of the dew fall.
20 July 1936
Whole cities
Were ablaze,
Villages
Crashed in smoke.
Be with me,
Stern prophet
Habakkuk!
Gall to me
Is my food
And drink. From
Head to foot,
Black rage, coat
Me with soot.
1937
Quippe ubi fas versum atque nefas: tot bella per orbem, Tam multae scelerum facies…
Virgil
It’s long since we last met here. Did the song of the thrushes call you?
I’m listening to the woods: there is such a din now spring’s here!
This isn’t spring. The sky wants to fool us. Just look at this puddle:
Now it is smiling meekly, but at night when the frost congeals it
It’ll bare its teeth! This is April: a fool’s month to believe in.
Those little tulips there have been nipped in the bud by frost.
It’s not that I’m sad: I’ve grown so used to this terrible world
That sometimes I am not hurt by it – merely disgusted.
What I’d heard is now certain. On the ridges of the wild Pyrenees
Red-hot cannon wrangle amid corpses stiff with blood,
And bears join with the soldiers as they flee.
In flocks, with knotted bundles, flee old folk, women and children,
Throwing themselves to the ground as death starts circling above,
And there are so many lying dead, they are left there, no one
removes them.
I think you knew Federico. Did he escape, ah tell me!
He did not flee. They killed him. Two years ago in Granada.
García Lorca is dead! And you are the first to tell me!
The news of war travels so fast, yet the poet
Can just disappear like that. Did Europe not mourn his death?
It was not even noticed. At best, the wind in the pyre’s ashes,
Groping, will find among them some broken line to remember.
This much is left, no more, to the curious who come after us.
He did not flee. He died. But then where can a poet escape?
Nor did our belovèd Attila flee; he just said No
To the present state. And yet, who mourns him now he has fallen?
How do you live? Can your words still find an echo in these times?
While cannon boom? Among smouldering ruins, deserted villages?
Still, I keep on writing and live in this frenzied world
As that oak over there: it knows it will be cut down and already
Is marked with a white cross, showing that there, tomorrow,
The woodcutter begins. Yet, as it waits, it puts forth a new leaf.
You are fortunate here: it’s so still – few wolves come this way,
And as it is months since your master was here, you can often
Forget that the flock you tend belongs to somebody else.
God bless you. Time I get home, old night will have fallen upon me.
The butterfly dusk is fluttering, its wings shedding silver sift.
1938
I am a poet and unnecessary,
Even when, wordless, I go murmuring
Ti-tum ti-tum. Who cares? Instead of me,
The nosy little devils sing.
And oh, believe me, do! Not without reason,
Prudent suspicion fans my face like breath:
I am a poet, good for the stake alone,
As witness to the truth,
Who knows that snow is white, that blood is red
And that the poppy’s flower is red as well
With its fine, fuzzy stem green as the field,
Who knows that, in the end, he will be killed
Because he would not kill.
1 June 1939
The moon bobs on the sky’s foam.
I wonder at being alive tonight.
Assiduous death keeps searching our dark time
And those he finds are all unearthly white.
Sometimes the year looks back, lets out a scream,
Looks back, then passes out appalled.
Again what a grim autumn’s crouched behind me
And what a winter, numbed by pain and dulled!
The forest bled and, in the cycle
Of time, each hour would shed its blood.
The wind scrawled numbers, vast and dark,
On snow-drifts in the wood.
I have come to see both that and this.
I feel how heavily air weighs on the earth.
A warm silence, alive with rustling noises,
Envelops me – as before birth.
I stop under a tree whose leaves
Seethe with anger. Its branches creak.
One reaches down – to grasp my throat?
I am no coward, nor am I weak,
But tired. I hold my tongue. The branch
Gropes through my hair in silence, fearfully.
I know we ought to forget, but I
Never forget a single memory.
The moon founders in foam. Across the sky
A dark green track of poison has been driven.
I stand and roll myself a cigarette,
Slowly, carefully. I am living.
8 June 1940
Restless the sun erupts, it’s lapped today
By iron-grey, fire-fringed flags.
Its vapours stream down, and the floating light
Bites into louring fogs.
The clouds are ruffled. The smooth pane of the sky
Ripples in the wind, as the blue flies away.
The low flight of a swallow preparing to leave
Describes a screaming ‘e’ or ‘a’.
Autumn begins restlessly: the leaves,
Dying in rust, are flailing up and down
And the sky’s breath is cool.
The air gives off no warmth – nothing but smoke.
The sun no more than sighs today, and feebly.
A lizard scuttles on the great graveyard wall.
Autumn’s ravening wasps,
Gorging on flesh, are buzzing rabidly.
Men on the banked earth
Of trenches sit and stare
At the deep fires of death.
The smell of heavy leaf-mould floats on the air.
Flame flies above the road –
Half light, half blood, it flares on the coming dark.
Brown leaves burning in the wind
Flutter, spark.
And clustered grapes weigh on the vine, the vine-shoots wilt.
Drily the stems of yellow flowers
Crackle, and seeds fall to the ground.
The meadow is swimming in the evening mist.
At length, the wild clattering sound
Of distant carts shakes from the trees
The landscape falls asleep.
Death, lovely in his white glide,
Settles on the countryside.
The sky cradles the garden.
Look: in your hair’s an autumn leaf that’s golden.
Above you, branches weep.
Ah but your flame must rise above death and autumn
And raise me, love, along with you.
Let the wise thing be to love me today –
Be wise and kiss me, hungry for dreams too.
Joyfully love me, do not leave me, fall
With me into the dark sky sleep creates.
Let’s sleep. Out there, the thrush is well asleep.
The walnut, falling on fallen leaves piled deep,
Makes no harsh sound. And reason disintegrates.
10 October 1941
The heart is asleep and, in the heart, anxiety.
The fly is asleep near the cobweb on the wall.
The house is quiet: not a scratch from a wakeful mouse.
The garden sleeps, the branch, the woodpecker in the trunk,
The beetle sleeps in the rose, the bee in the hive
And summer in the wheat-grains that are scattering.
Flame sleeps in the moon, too, cold medal on the sky.
Autumn is up and, to steal, goes stealthily by.
1 June 1942
Where the pavement of the Boulevard Saint Michel
Turns into Rue Cujas, there’s a slight camber.
Oh time of youth, so wild and beautiful,
I’ve not forgotten you: my heart remembers
Like a mine-shaft your voice’s resonance.
Our baker had his shop on Rue Monsieur le Prince.
And to the left, where the park trees show tall,
One tree was yellowing against the sky,
As if already it had glimpsed the fall.
Freedom, oh cherished nymph with the long thigh,
Are you still hiding in the twilight gold
Among the veiling trees, just as you were of old?
Summer was like an army marching in
To drumbeats, sweating, raising dust on the road.
A cool mist followed in its tracks, and then
To either side of it a fragrance flowed.
Noon was still summertime; come afternoon,
Sweet autumn visited behind a front of rain.
In those days I enjoyed a life unbound
As a child does, yet I was one who’d know,
Like an old pedant, that the earth was round.
I was green still, but with a beard like snow.
I wandered freely. Whom would it concern?
Then going underground, I felt the deep fires burn.
Where are you now, O stations of time past:
CHATELET – CITE – ST MICH’ and ODEON?
Then DENFERT-ROCHEREAU – like a name cursed.
The map that flowered on the stained wall is gone.
I shout: Where are you? And I strain to hear,
And then the nights! Those wanderings by night
From the outskirts toward the Quartier!
Will dawn ever again with its strange light
Pierce through the dull sky as a soft grey,
As when, from poetising, drunk in the head,
I undressed half-asleep and fell into my bed.
If only I had the strength just to return
And skip the headlong current of my fate!
The cat from the cheap, smelly restaurant
Downstairs would go up on the roof to mate.
The noise it made! Will I, just once again,
Hear that? For then I learned in what a din
Noah, so long ago, floated beneath the moon.
14 August 1943
O peace of ancient prisons, beautiful
Outmoded suffering, the heroic stance
Sublimely struck, the poet’s death, and all
Such measured speech as finds an audience –
How far away they are. Whoever dares
Even move, steps in the void. A foggy blur.
Reality, like damaged earthenware,
Bulges and waits for the one thing to occur:
To be reduced to shards and rottenness.
How will it be for him who for the time
He lives – allowed to – speaks in measured rhyme
And teaches judgement of whatever is?
And would teach still. But all things fall apart.
He sits and stares: is utterly inert.
27 March 1944
Hail! How well you endure this rugged mountain walk,
Fine old man. Is it that wings lift you or enemies hunt you?
Wings bear you, passion drives you, lightning flares in your eyes.
Hail, venerable elder! You are one, I now perceive,
Of the ireful prophets of old – but tell me, which of their number?
Which am I? I am Nahum the Elkoshite. It was I
Who thundered against the concupiscent city of Nineveh, I
Who declaimed the word of the Lord, his brimming vessel of anger.
I know your ancient fury – your writings have been preserved.
They have. But more than of old, today, sin multiplies,
Yet even today there is no one who knows what the Lord’s end is.
For the Lord said he would cause the abundant rivers to dry up,
Bashan to languish, and Carmel, and Lebanon’s flower to wither,
The mountains would quake – all things would be consumed in fire.
And all this has befallen.
To the slaughter nations scramble.
And the soul of man is stripped bare, even as Nineveh.
What use had admonitions? And the savage ravening locusts
In their green clouds, what effect? Of all beasts man is the basest.
Here, tiny babes are dashed against walls and, over there,
The church tower is a torch, the house an oven roasting
Its own people. Whole factories fly up in their smoke.
The street runs mad with people on fire, then swoons with a wail,
The vast bomb-bays disgorge, the great clamps loose their burdens
And the dead lie there, shrivelled, spattering city squares
Like a herd’s dung on the pasture: everything, once again,
Has happened as you foretold. What brings you back here, tell me,
To earth from ancient cloud-swirl?
Wrath: that man as ever
Is an orphan again among the hosts of the seeming-human,
The heathen. And I wish again to see the strongholds of sin
Fall – wish to bear witness for the ages yet to come.
You have already done so. The Lord spoke through you long ago:
Cried woe to the fortress filled with the spoils of war – with bastions
Built of cadavers! But tell me, can it be so that fury
Has survived in you these millennia – with divine, unquenchable blaze?
There was a time when the Lord touched my unclean lips
As he did the sage Isaiah’s. With his ember hovering over me
God probed my heart. The coal was a live coal and red-hot –
An angel held it with tongs and ‘Look, here am I: let me
Also be called upon to preach thy word’ I cried after him.
And once a man has been sent by the Lord, he has no age,
He has no peace. The coal, angelic, burns on in his lips.
And what is a thousand years to the Lord? A mayfly time!
How young you are, father! I envy you. What is my own brief time
To your awesome age? Even these few fleeting moments
Are wearing me down – like a round stone in a wild stream.
So you may think. But I know your new poems. Wrath nurtures you.
The poet’s wrath, like the prophet’s – it is food and drink
To the people. Whoever would may live on it until
The coming of the kingdom that young disciple promised,
The young rabbi whose life fulfilled our words and the law.
Come with me to preach that already the hour is at hand,
The kingdom about to be born. ‘What,’ I asked before,
‘Is the Lord’s end?’ Lo, it is that kingdom. Come let us go:
Gather the people together. Bring your wife. Cut staffs.
Staffs for the wanderer are good companions. Look:
That one, let me have that one: I like the gnarled ones better.
Lager Heideman
23 August 1944
A fool he is who, collapsed, rises and walks again,
Ankles and knees moving alone, like wandering pain,
Yet he, as if wings uplifted him, sets out on his way,
And in vain the ditch calls him back, who dare not stay.
And if asked why not, he might answer – without leaving his path –
That his wife was awaiting him, and a saner, more beautiful death.
Poor fool! He’s out of his mind: now, for a long time,
Only scorched winds have whirled over the houses at home,
The wall has been laid low, the plum-tree is broken there,
The night of our native hearth flutters, thick with fear.
Oh if only I could believe that everything of worth
Were not just in my heart – that I still had a home on earth.
If only I had! As before, jam made fresh from the plum
Would cool on the old verandah, in peace the bee would hum,
And an end-of-summer stillness would bask in the drowsy garden,
Naked among the leaves would sway the fruit-trees’ burden,
And there would be Fanni waiting blonde, by the russet hedgerow,
As the slow morning painted slow shadow over shadow…
Could it perhaps still be? The moon tonight’s so round!
Don’t leave me, friend, shout at me: I’ll get up off the ground!
15 September 1944
From Bulgaria, wild and swollen, the noise of cannon rolls;
It booms against the ridge, then hesitates, and falls.
Men, animals, carts, thoughts pile up as they fly;
The road rears back and whinnies, maned is the racing sky.
But you in this shifting chaos are what in me is constant:
In my soul’s depth forever, you shine – you are as silent
And motionless as an angel who marvels at destruction,
Or a beetle burrowing in a hollow tree’s corruption.
In the mountains
30 August 1944
No more than six or seven miles away
Haystacks and houses flare;
There, on the meadow’s verges, peasants crouch,
Pipe-smoking, dumb with fear.
Here still, where the tiny shepherdess steps in,
Ripples on the lake spread;
A flock of ruffled sheep bend over it
And drink the clouds they tread.
Cservenka
6 October 1944
Blood-red, the spittle drools from the oxen’s mouths,
The men stooping to urinate pass blood,
The squad stands bunched in groups whose reek disgusts.
And loathsome death blows overhead in gusts.
Mohács
24 October 1944
I fell beside him. His body, which was taut
As a cord is when it snaps, spun as I fell.
Shot in the neck. ‘This is how you will end,’
I whispered to myself. ‘Keep lying still.
Now, patience is flowering into death.’
‘Der springt noch auf,’ said someone over me.
Blood on my ears was drying, caked with earth.
Szentkirályszabadja
31 October 1944