Стихи и эссе

     She looked over his shoulder
     For vines and olive trees,
     Marble well-governed cities
     And ships upon untamed seas,
     But there on the shining metal
     His hands had put instead
     An artificial wilderness
     And a sky like lead.

     A plain without a feature, bare and brown,

     No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
     Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
     Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
     An unintelligible multitude,
     A million eyes, a million boots in line,
     Without expression, waiting for a sign.

     Out of the air a voice without a face

     Proved by statistics that some cause was just
     In tones as dry and level as the place:
     No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
     Column by column in a cloud of dust
     They marched away enduring a belief
     Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

     She looked over his shoulder

     For ritual pieties,
     White flower-garlanded heifers,
     Libation and sacrifice,
     But there on the shining metal
     Where the altar should have been,
     She saw by his flickering forge-light
     Quite another scene.

     Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

     Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
     And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
     A crowd of ordinary decent folk
     Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
     As three pale figures were led forth and bound
     To three posts driven upright in the ground.

     The mass and majesty of this world, all

     That carries weight and always weighs, the same
     Lay in the hands of others; they were small
     And could not hope for help and no help came:
     What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
     Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
     And died as men before their bodies died.

     She looked over his shoulder

     For athletes at their games,
     Men and women in a dance
     Moving their sweet limbs
     Quick, quick, to music,
     But there on the shining shield
     His hands had set no dancing-floor
     But a weed-choked field.

     A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

     Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
     Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
     That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
     Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
     Of any world where promises were kept,
     Or one could weep because another wept.

     The thin-lipped armorer,

     Hephaestos, hobbled away,
     Thetis of the shining breasts
     Cried out in dismay
     At what the god had wrought
     To please her son, the strong
     Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
     Who would not live long.

1952

Friday's Child

(In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,

martyred at Flossenb"urg, April 9, 1945)