Great Throughts Treasury

"Where Messina lay violet upon the waters, among the mangled wires and rubble, you walk along the rails and switches in your islanders' cock-of-the-walk beret. For three days now, the earthquake boils, it's hurricane December and a poisoned sea. Our nights fall into the freight cars; we, young livestock, count our dusty dreams with the dead crushed by iron, munching almonds and apples dried in garlands. The science of pain put truth and blades into our games on the lowlands of yellow malaria and tertian fever swollen with mud. Your patience, sand and delicate, robbed us of fear, a lesson of days linked to the death we had betrayed, to the scorn of the thieves seized among the debris, and executed in the dark by the firing squads of the landing parties, a tally of low numbers adding up exact concentric, a scale of future life. Back and forth your sun cap moved in the little space they always left you. For me, too, everything was measured and I have borne your name a little beyond the hatred and the envy. That red on your cap was a mitre; a crown with eagle's wings. and now in the eagle of your ninety years I wanted to speak to you -- your parting signals colored by the night-time lantern -- to speak to you from this imperfect wheel of a world, within a flood of crowded walls, far from the Arabian jasmine where you are still, to tell you what once I could not ? difficult affinity of thoughts -- to tell you (not only the marshland locust, the mystic tree can hear) as the watchman of the fields tells his master: 'I kiss your hands.' This, nothing else. Life is darkly strong."

"Where the trees render the evening yet more abandoned, how indolently your last footstep vanishes that appears with the flower of the lime, and insists on its fate. You search for reason in affection, you experience silence in life. Another outcome reveals to me mirrored time. It grieves like death, beauty now flashes like lightning in other faces. I have lost every innocence, even in this voice that survives to imitate joy."

"You are still the one with the stone and the sling, man of my time. You were in the cockpit, with the malevolent wings, the meridians of death, -I have seen you - in the chariot of fire, at the gallows, at the wheels of torture. I have seen you: it was you, with your exact science set on extermination, without love, without Christ. You have killed again, as always, as your fathers killed, as the animals killed that saw you for the first time. And this blood smells as on the day when one brother told the other brother: 'let us go into the fields.' and that echo, chill, tenacious, has reached down to you, within your day. Forgot, o sons, the clouds of blood risen from the earth, forget your fathers: their tombs sink down in ashes, black birds, the wind, cover their heart."

"You are the creature still of stone and sling, man of my time. Yours was the cockpit of malignant wings, the gnomons of death, ? I saw you ? in the fiery chariot, at the gallows, at the torturer?s wheel. I saw you: it was you, your exact science devoted to extermination, without love, or savior. Again you kill, as ever, as your fathers did, as the creatures that saw you for the first time, killed. And the blood still smells of that day when one brother said to the other: ?Let us go to the field.? And that echo, chill, tenacious, reaches down to you, in your day. Forget, o sons, the clouds born of blood risen from the earth, forget the fathers: their tombs sink down deep in the ashes, dark birds, the wind, cover their hearts."

"You arrive in my voice and I see the quiet light descend in shadowy rays and make you a cloud of stars about my head. And I suspended there, to stupefy myself with angels, the dead, the bright arc of air. Not mine; but within the space re-emerged, trembling in me, grown dark and tall."

"You should not have ripped out your image taken from us, from the world, a portion of beauty. What can we do we enemies of death, bent to your feet of rose, your breast of violet? Not a word, not a scrap of your last day, a No to earth?s things, a No to our dull human record. The sad moon in summer, the dragging anchor, took your dreams, hills, trees, light, waters, darkness, not dim thoughts but truths, severed from the mind that suddenly decided, time and all future evil. Now you are shut behind heavy doors enemy of death. Who cries? You have blown out beauty with a breath, torn her, dealt her the death-wound, without a tear for her insensate shadow?s spreading over us. Destroyed solitude, and beauty, failed. You have signaled into the dark, inscribed your name in air, your No to everything that crowds here and beyond the wind. I know what you were looking for in your new dress. I understand the unanswered question. Neither for you nor us, a reply. Oh, flowers and moss, Oh, enemy of death."

"There, at Auschwitz, far from the Vistula, love, on the northern plain in a field of death: funereal, cold, rain on the rusted poles, and a tangle of steel fences: and no trees or birds in the grey air, or above our thought, but inertia and pain that memory leaves to a silence without irony or anger. You sought neither elegy nor idyll: only a reason for our fate, here, you, sensitive to the contrasts of mind, unsure of the clear presence of life. And life is here, in every ?no? that seems sure: Here we can hear the angel weep, the monster, our future hours, beating at the beyond, which is here, in eternity and in motion, not in a vision in dreams, of possible mercy. And here are the metamorphoses, here are the myths. Without names of symbols or gods, they are chronicles, places on earth. They are Auschwitz, love. How suddenly it turned to the smoke of shades, that dear flesh of Alpheus, and Arethusa! From that hell revealed by a white inscription: ?Arbeit macht frei? the smoke issued endlessly of thousands of women thrust from kennels at dawn to the wall for target-practice, or stifled howling for merciful water with skeletal mouths under showers of gas. You?ll discover them, soldier, in your record, in the form of rivers, creatures, or are you too but ashes of Auschwitz, the medal of silence? Long tresses rest enclosed in urns of glass still crowded with amulets, and infinite shadows of little shoes, and Jewish shawls: they are the relics of a time of wisdom, of the wisdom of men who make weapons the measure, they are the myths, our metamorphoses. On the stretches of land where love and tears and pity rotted, in the rain, there a ?no? beat within us, a ?no? to death, dead at Auschwitz, never again, from that pit of ashes, death."

"Tindari, I know you mild between broad hills, overhanging the waters of the god?s sweet islands. Today, you confront me and break into my heart. I climb airy peaks, precipices, following the wind in the pines, and the crowd of them, lightly accompanying me, fly off into the air, wave of love and sound, and you take me to you, you from whom I wrongly drew evil, and fear of silence, shadow, - refuge of sweetness, once certain - and death of spirit. It is unknown to you, that country where each day I go down deep to nourish secret syllables. A different light strips you, behind the windows clothed in night, and another joy than mine lies against you. Exile is harsh and the search, for harmony, that ended in you changes today to a precocious anxiousness for death, and every love is a shield against sadness, a silent stair in the gloom, where you station me to break my bitter bread. Return, serene Tindari, stir me, sweet friend, to raise myself to the sky from the rock, so that I might shape fear, for those who do not know what deep wind has searched me."

"War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost. Poetics and philosophies disintegrate when the trees fall and the walls collapse . At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question. Men of letters who cling to the private successes of their petty aesthetics shut themselves off from poetry's restless presence. From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue. The politician and the mediocre poets with their armor of symbols and mystic purities pretend to ignore the real poet. It is a story which repeats itself like the cock's crow; indeed, like the cock's third crow."