Conscript (Section III)

CONSCRIPT

Kissing and oratory, the public orgy in the brazen light,

And flags, the clean wash of empires,

Hung out upon the crowded air,

And holy men dispensing benedictive speech,

Dilate our simple hate, our simple death,

Spread wide the rhetoric in colors of our blood,

Across the silent sun

Explode the bombast of our ancient sacraments.

These and the farewell bonfires on the beach at night

Inflate his tender make-believe, his simple fright.

The myth accumulating in transfigured air,

He dreams enormously and trembles there,

Ravished with bugles, sick for the flesh

Of girls and drunk with valedictory.

His house is built of thirty years. And when

Will he inhabit it again?

The knock is loud upon the door.

He has expected it for ten.

Now he who loved his three or four

Recalls the flesh he broke like bread;

This one is smiling clearly at the door, this one

Left by the west road, and one is dead.

And he remembers one in tears.

His house is built of thirty years.

These are the tokens he has kept:

Someone standing by the sea,

A village street, and twenty names.

What shall he do with memory?

That is the way you cannot look,

The house you cannot occupy;

For they have hung the air with flags

And canceled out the private sky.

The village with the windy bells,

The way they sang and swung their hands-

These are the way, the house, the joy;

It is the flower death disbands.

Il

But what is death, his mind repeats. Yes, what is death,

precisely, now? It is

The shadow of the sun. It is the breathless gardener, say,

'Who prunes the summer's mad excess.

But what is death? Not public death-my death.

Not murder, death. The pale rider

On the horse. Mother of poetry, and quite a sleep.

Or, she is empress of the dark eventual sea

Which drinks the rivers where we drift.

They used to call him angel,

He is lunatic and brief.

Pure anonymity, the host whom you will never thank-

It is not something words can bear.

But shut your eyes and stare.

He knows the grave play of men

Defining vainly what they dream,

Till words and dream are one.

The sound of the dumb sea,

The silence of the roaring sun.

IH

His mother sets the supper out,

Recalling what his father said;

He takes the curse his father bore,

The first born of the dead.

The old darkness howling in our bones

Looses the creatures for their feast;

Nor shall he find his peace till they

Lie down together, man and beast.

He does not mouth deluded words

For glory and her blowzy kiss,

But something in him cries aloud

And what he says is this:

Time welds a brotherhood at last-

Tell me I know that this is true!

What little faith still lights the will

Is less for those I serve than those

They send me out to kill.

We cursed the fools who made the wrongs,

The criminals to right them,

And damned the knaves who make the wars

And damned the fools who fight them;

Reaping what I never sowed,

Answering for lies I never told,

I give my yard of bloody ground

And honor worth its weight in gold.

If villains forge the name of truth,

Thieves teach their blind to pray,

Tell me truth driven underground

Will bloom another day.

Not all the words I ever learned

Could ever save my age;

But tell me once again the words

Survive the burning page.

Not swindled by the dulcet prayers

Nor practising the hero's voice

(Now no one good enough to fight

Has any but a victim's choice)

Not for the lies of murderers,

Whose death will be undone,

But lovers in the streets again,

Companions who will take the sun.

But a city they will call their own,

And who will build it fair,

Who see from this one brought to dust

Another written in the air.

In praises of the unarrived,

In lands where lies and guns have dinned,

Like seeds upon the doubtful air,

My faith entrusted to the wind.

Funeral speech:

No love redeems the life of living men

But man the murderer extols the dead.

Summer will burn her skies away, and then

What dreams the leaf will kindle in his head.

Think what the arms that take us in farewell

Might fashion for the sick and living one,

And what in darkness all the dead would tell

The mortal begging in the squandered sun.