The Death of John Pendlebury
It's safer to go forward than retreat,
better face danger than take flight;
to leap, and then land lightly on the feet.
I told the General, if you arm the men of Crete,
no Nazi thug will see tomorrow's light;
it's safer to go forward than retreat.
Honor required of every young athlete
who faced the charging bull, to stand upright,
to leap, and then land lightly on the feet.
Go to the tavernas, go out and meet
old men who fought the Turks, who know in any fight
it's safer to go forward than retreat.
I'll not live now to see this sad defeat
by Hitler Youth prepared by day or night
to leap, and then land lightly on the feet.
I shot three paratroopers in the street,
but now against this wall my blood runs bright.
It's safer to go forward than retreat.
I'll leap, and then land lightly on my feet.
John Pendlebury, chief archaeologist at Knossos, also served in Military Intelligence until his death in the German invasion of Crete in 1941.
Every Night I Go Back to Skopelos
My brother was killed in Northern Greece
fighting the Italians in the snow.
When the war ended, we rejoiced, although
there was no work, and very little peace.
My husband said we'd emigrate. But I said no.
And then our youngest child, the baby, died.
On the dock, my mother screamed and cried.
We came to Canada, to Ontario.
It's April. I see the island in my sleep,
her flowers like waterfalls. I just don't know
how it can still be twenty-five below,
with drifts along the driveway four feet deep.
I'm thirty-three. I look like an old crow,
dressed head to foot in black, against the snow.
Fred Varley in his Studio
He stands at the easel in old age,
in his attic space,
cigarette stubs at his feet,
boots by the table, on it a jug of milk,
a slice of cheese folded in a hunk of bread
cut with a butcher knife,
books and drawings strewn around the place.
He has a genius for losing
clothes, jobs, homes, and women,
and for capturing the darkness
of the notch at the base
of a throat, a model cupping an apple
in her timeless palm
with meditative grace.
Out of his poverty he bequeaths us
the planes of a shoulder, a forehead, a trace
of green shadow about a seductive mouth.
The brown cord coat is flecked with paint,
the palette thumb-hole smooth with use,
but the blue eyes are still bright
and watchful in the creased and fractured face.
The Gift that’s Unexpected
What about love? she says
She looks at me across the shrimp and oysters
We meet like this, every few months, to talk theology
I bite on something hard, and hope it’s not a broken tooth
She looks at me across the shrimp and oysters
It’s March: the southern air is soft and warm
I bite on something hard, and hope it’s not a broken tooth
Along the causeway, pelicans dive for fish
It’s March: the southern air is soft and warm
Across the bay, the Alabama looms
Along the causeway, pelicans dive for fish
I tongue the object from my mouth
Across the bay, the Alabama looms
Because she’s here, the day is radiant
I tongue the object from my mouth
The word made flesh, she says
Because she’s here, the day is radiant
Between my fingers is a tiny pearl
The word made flesh, she says
The gift that’s unexpected is the best
Between my fingers is a tiny pearl
We meet like this, every few months, to talk theology
The gift that’s unexpected is the best
What about love? she says.
A Good Death
A scrambling in the wood stove;
another sparrow
has come down the chimney.
I let her out;
she flies straight at the window,
hits the glass, drops dead:
free
and heading for the light.
Hideki Yukawa
How peaceful it is not to be noticed!
My schoolfriends called me Gonbei,
Hall of Quiet Thoughts.
Once, when I was in the first grade,
a girl gave me a handful of cherry blossoms.
The distance and mass
of the particle are inversely related.
I postulated the existence of the meson,
and calculated its mass
as 200 times that of the electron.
When we lived in the house with the stone lanterns
at Higashizakura, my brothers and I used to play
in the graveyard of the Jóken Temple.
I slipped and struck my head against a grave marker.
For a moment I saw darkness, and then sunbeams
through the leaves of the cherry trees.
Years later, with the idea of the meson,
I caught a memory of those midday stars.
Her ear lobes were just like the petals
of the cherry blossoms that she gave me.
Hideki Yukawa won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1949.
Nocturne, Old Prague, 1911
There is always a source of light
in the paintings of Jakub Schikaneder,
and so it is in this one,
Nocturne, Old Prague, 1911.
In a dignified quarter of the city,
the glow of a gaslight
is diffused by the mist of the autumn dusk,
an autumn of damp pavements, wood smoke,
dead leaves, and early nightfall.
Above the bare trees, a window is open,
the room within lit warm by firelight
and in the window
the painter has placed a touch of red
where someone waits in the twilight;
a figure by the window, watching and waiting,
at the end of the long Hapsburg evening,
before the beginning of the night.
A Ballad of General Maud'huy
The year was 1917,
the place was Northern France,
the Germans from their concrete lines
had halted our advance,
and we all thought who marched and fought
we lived by grace or chance.
A troop of twelve came down the road
as the sun began to rise,
an unarmed soldier in their midst
with terror in his eyes:
this was, by God, the firing squad
we'd come to recognize.
The General heard them going by
with steady somber tread.
He stepped outside, held up his hand
and faced the man they led.
"What did you do?" he asked the youth.
"I left my post," he said.
"You understand you let us down?"
the General asked the man,
"We're ordering our troops to do
more than most mortals can;
we'd soon be done if everyone
threw down his gun and ran."
The soldier hung his head in shame,
but the General wasn't done.
"The example that we make of you
is an important one.
It means your pain is not in vain;
you die for France, my son."
The young man raised his lowered head,
his stance no longer cowed,
he now saw reason in his death
and stood with head unbowed.
His youthful face bore sorrow's trace
but now his look was proud.
The General shook the soldier's hand,
saluted a farewell.
A volley from a mile away
marked where our comrade fell.
The General lit a cigarette
and damned all wars to hell.
Uncle Jake
His brothers all did medicine or law,
but he took on the farm and made it pay.
Although the land was rocky and the soil was poor,
he raised a herd of beef and crops of corn and hay.
But beavers built their dams across the creek,
flooded the fields, cut birch trees by the score,
and Uncle Jake, though usually meek,
blew up their dams and lodges: this was total war!
I saw him in the hospital, a week
before he died, when he was eighty-four;
shrunken and pallid, he could hardly speak.
I told him of the new lodge by the shore,
he grasped my wrist, sat up, his eyes grew bright:
Get dynamite, he roared, Get dynamite!
Poodle
There was a big old groundhog, my brother said,
living under a wood pile in the field.
The dogs cornered him one time, all six of them.
He lay back and slashed and bit
and in the end they all backed off.
One dog lost the best part of an ear.
The poodle wanted to join in,
but just ran round the outside of the circle barking.
That poodle, I said, must have been a poet.
To read David Pratt’s epic poem, Bataan, go to http://www.battlingbastardsbataan.com/poem.htm
Visit my other web site at www.theimpossibletakeslonger.com .
|
