| I Lie here, and we shall die, but try to take me Before they come; their droning wings have roared So close so many times, that I am bored With death; now give me life instead, now break me With life, so make me what they could not make me: Dead, yet myself — this blood, so stingy-stored, Lavish in death against your body poured — And if I sleep . . . and if they come . . . then wake me. Look, I will braid our hair into a braid — Such lanky locks! — and this is you and me. The night is very calm: another raid, I think. I see your mouth — oh, I can see. No, you have loved me: I am not afraid; I just was wondering if it would be we. II Well, we have lived so far; we are alive; War is a way of living. If today We die, we have to do that anyway Sometime. It's not so bad, once you contrive To make a home of it; we do not thrive, Yet here we are, at least, — no place to stay, A place to stop in, though — and we can say Hello to friends; and I have learned to drive. The worst is being hated, and to hate; Perhaps if it were hurricane or flood That dragged us from our beds, we might await The shock, the twisted wreckage and the mud With lighter hearts, that being not man, but fate . . . And only friendly dogs to lap our blood. III He has no grudge at all, the grievously Abruptly prematurely newly killed; To him who cannot smell pine-boards, not-willed And willed are one: none is so quick as he To cancel quarrels — let the dead past be (And the dead future also). Not unskilled In living are the moment-eaters, filled With Now, — so might he see it, could he see. We were attacked — what of it? — we could go And lie in hiding; we were free to run From Death! — and this will not again be so. Now he is free from nothing: man and gun Have spat into his face; the mouth I know In memory, sleeps defiled by everyone. IV Let me recall his valour, not his love; Love was his loneliness; his limping pride, Save when we lay bewildered side by side, Was on its feet all day; he could not move Wrong — as most patient history stood to prove — By dying up against it; but he tried. The walls are washed, the doors flung open wide, The city conquered, he not spoken of. Time does not forfeit; Time does not abstain: The future in one fist, he eats the past. I know this; yet again and yet again I try to hold the present, make it last One moment, that the simple great be slain Not unperceived. No hope — Time eats so fast. V But if you loved me it was long ago And gurgled with the emptying of the year. Shall I remember — sitting silent here Watching the pulsing and the bright outflow Of vintages we all had come to know As excellent, seeing without a tear The future bashed and jetting, bold, not clear — Love? — and if once you loved me, whether or no? I forget nothing; every airiest thing You said, I could recall, or I replied; I have no time for such remembering: The world is an accident, has died Perhaps already — ambulance! ding-ding! — Something instructs the corpuscle inside. |
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