Muir Holburn - Selected Poems
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CHRISTMAS, 1942
Winter was over.
We wintered in the library
Collecting our winter references, which the pen
Scrawled heavily, and were bitter to the taste.
So near had the heart been to celebration.
Armies of hideousness, it had seemed, were met
Amply by the ranks of young men travelling outwards
To settle the innocents’ score.
But winter came with mud and trepidation.
The men were not afraid, but how could the mind
Schooled in the long dull exercise of collapse
Have cheer? It is as well we were not there
In the mutilated cold, in the screaming hinge of struggle,
And knew only the cold heart’s cynic hopelessness.
We should have been no courage. Remember this -
Despair of man is proved the cynic’s ration
And the fool’s diet.
We were afraid
And in the library collected
what we hoped to hide and salvage
Against worse weather. We were no courage.
But now
Winter was over –
Stalingrad was over.
We came from fanatic gloom, our work done –
Their work done. Stalingrad was over.
And no sacred annals
Recorded a miracle like this to fright
A prophet’s eyes or toss in disarray
A simple people’s alphabet of sense.
Here no battle
To be indexed by ants in the official history,
Leaded in the gaudy window of an Ode,
And then forgotten.
This was man’s victory
Sealing the dubious centuries. This established
The living as valuable and its dignity
Set beyond clever laughter. This the quiet answer
To scheme and horror sown in loneliness.
No wonder Summer
Saw lines of communication throb again
with carol of a comfort new to man.
And theatres of searing encounter, desert and jungle,
Ancient city and mine, sealane and soul
Flare high in strange resistance.
Even you and I
Beneath our shame at our frail wintering,
Watched old streets long fallen in a chill alien sleep
Suddenly flower, and with blossom and leaf
Sweet and music and slang
Chortle and song
Make utterance that was intimate again.
Pulse swiftened in factory, bedroom, cafe and wharf.
And even the sky, it seemed,
Unlocked its enormous orchards and let fall
Down the soft sunlight
Poems
Everywhere.
Winter was over.
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