Muir Holburn - Selected Poems
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SOLDIER BEFORE A CITY
i
See how the mists rise quickly from our fingers,
And our bright boots tickle the vivid morning.
Now before us and behind us lie many strange countries—
Pregnant with novel cultures, awaiting conquest. Women
Bake their white loaves in blackened ovens. Men
Who have been in circulation a long time, who have
Sex, wine and picnics as palliatives, prepare
Type file, despatch and publish many cheques,
Ledgers, dossiers, brochures, papers in a suite
Of little rooms. Exploited girls
Whisper sad promises at the uproarious corners. The fragrant young
Plan route marches along the corridors of their days.
Shy virgins are painting their lips, playing the gramophone,
Dreaming of their own fecund survival. Unwitting,
All prepare for our arrival . . .
ii
When our sharp spurs shall stir
Synthetic strength and agonised desire
In our horses, when their iron hooves
Shall smack the paving of alien streets,
Some will fling open high windows and wave and smile,
For they were restless in the old times and had desired change.
Others who are forced to make a pause
At the lunch hour of their lives, they will weep
Silently into linen handkerchiefs, murmuring:
‘Why did this have to be? By what plan? Under whose craven direction
Was such a vast assault permitted? At whose bidding? Why
When we have sown our seed and tenderly nourished our gardens,
Should wild young cattle break through the gap in the hedge, trampling up
The soft and liquid tissue of our earth?
Surely there is some great madness in this!
For the texts and the moralities that we can
Dimly remember—the Golden Sayings stamped in Gothic type
Along the margins of our copy books—
These tenets, learnt by rote, duly applied, (or
Applied as often as was practical and convenient),
Which we had considered to be the Thus and the So
Of Night and Day, of breathing and of the exchange of goods and thought—
All are denied. The splintering cacophony
Of horses’ hooves on Constitution Mall—horses
Ridden by youths thoughtless as children, wild and lustful as young duncoloured bulls, covetous
As Jews, heedless as Saul, glib as the Pharisees—
This harsh diapason spells the end for us,
A dreadful passacaglia of finality.
We tremble for the honour of our daughters and for the lives of our sons. Always
When our Great Fathers were laid to rest, or when
A Prince of ours had died, or an Infanta,
And they were borne along muted boulevards,
Stern were the marches funèbres about their graves.
What man was their abroad who did not feel
A moment of chill fear glazing his heart?
Did not tremble at the dying chromatic, the downward
Adagio? And this shoutinghoofbeatsmarching
Fires an anguish like that music for us—
Shriller, but more of terror for us . . .’
iii
Then there are others in the important sectors
Who do not share the city’s panic. It seems
They were prepared. These are not often seen,
But drive in closed cars among the baroque buildings,
Ignoring traffic direction, their dizzy passage
Unhindered by police whose eyes are focused
On the "subversive" who refuse to eat
The rissole of surrender. All day they sit
On strange directorates. We take their orders. They appear
To be the calm kings who plan the recurring drama
In each exploding capital. Persona grata
With our commanders, they send imperious telegrams. While the alleys writhe
Beneath our conventional terrors—the broken shopfront,
The raided attic, the gassed crowd, the burnt
Literature, they broadcast
Their popular imperatives: ‘Be calm.
Have trust in these weeks of difficulty. Order must be
Preserved at all costs. The conqueror can be squared.
Though in the fever of the mountain battles
We urged you direly to victory,
With information on his bestiality, close observation
Clearly discloses he is not an animal. He is human, we discover.
So go to your houses. Do not
Congregate after dusk. Observe the ancient laws; the
Conqueror requires it. Preserve
Our placid front, our we-can-take-it front, for which
We’re famed in our long history of defeats.’
Meanwhile in banquet halls they do us high honour
With piquant catering and wine from their hills.
Luxuriant men in bowler hats and gloves!
You I fear most in the overridden city.
With authoritative eye, did you chart out these manoeuvres?
Am I your vassal, you whom my arms overwhelmed?
iv
Then those who are crazed and crippled with their years,
Who no more adhere, or cope, or are personally involved or interested,
Those who resemble roses in an early winter,
They have fermented their seed, yielded it to the skies,
And they will not be troubled by an unexpected modulation,
Or chose to greatly wonder whether their petals shall be preserved
In the National Herbarium, or whether
Their seed shall have taken root in a different territory.
v
I have seen too the downtown of this city—
And this shall be the same. Its image brands
Deeper than composition of claret and cedar, deeper
Than the big men’s inscrutable eyes or the ageds’
Bewilderment or the respectable suburb’s acidulous regrets.
This is the city’s vital—lung and bursting heart—but all infected
With virus of sadness O profounder than
My own futility. Here darkness gathers on darkness and the needles of masonry
Sow gusty flowers of filth on the unravelling sheet
Of sky. The narrow street country where gutter and window slit
Emit the stales of death, death died each day
Without finality, with no shining utterness
As in the field.
When I shall pass,
The blinds will blink and quiver,
Eyes seek cracked panes, eyes of passivity,
Eyes of strength assessing our advertised practice,
The vicious procedures of their enemies.
Am I then
In this beaten and cavernous neighbourhood
The enemy?
The factory gates
Open at five, at the hooter’s scream, for it’s
Business as usual, so the
Conquered decree in the conquered city—we seemingly
Find the directive amiable. The effective and living machinery
Disintegrates outwards into the shamed, damp shadows,
Baleful its burdened slouch, aware that all anguish
That I could bring is dull to the touch beside
The merciless birch of days, terribly wielded
By the black-hatted men with the technics and power
To shatter the delicate instruments of struggle.
Here in this wilderness of iron and asphalt,
Of compulsory effort and death between cog and blade,
Here I find, beneath the eruption of flaccidity and pain
Sadness because of men’s divine desire,
Desire for life, desire in such a surge
As lover or prophet or banker never knew,
Nor was ever dreamed of in their philosophies.
Desire thrills in these children’s fevered laughter,
In the blacking of steps, in the planting of window boxes;
Desire is their bone, making their despair
Never complete, accepting all retrenchment
So flesh stay whole and desire burn in flesh,
Or yielding flesh so desire burn more savage
In other hearts. Here is the greatest sadness, here
Where life must scramble on the degraded stoneworks, life
Stifled by smoke and drouth of sun. And here I must patrol,
A soldier, sinister protagonist of death.
Here is the greatest joy.
Here are desire and life; here are hot fires
In feeblest gesture of hand and eye and brain. Promise as nowhere.
This I know, being war’s traveller,
Having read many chapters of time and place,
This I know—these zones will be reclaimed
By men of such desire. They will alter
All landscape and remould my vision too.
Will liquidate the errors of my kind,
Will someday give me better tasks to do.
Here I am happiest in this climate of shame and desire where the city
Is ragged but sternly living, where beneath the scarred
Loose and discoloured skin, the fist is hard.
vi
You may think me an imaginative young man.
But I assure you this is so. For when I have laughed and lunged
Into other cities, it has been the same. The reactions
Have lacked variety. I assure you this is so.
You can see it doesn’t pay to wonder or to drift too much
On the stream of an idea. It is not to be considered
That we the Victors should mope and meditate and feel
By strange ways conquered. But somewhere,
Somewhere perhaps after you are given
The freedom of a city, or after you have felt
The brimming exultation of a winning battle,
Beyond and after all this I say—there is a pain
In the tired eyes of the women, in there mechanical warmth, or in
The hopeless gestures of our active enemies.
When I lie in bed, either at home
Or in barracks, I feel a thought like a tempered blade
Pierce the lapping darkness, shave through
The sullen textures of my mind, I wonder,
Struggling for the right word: ‘There is always
A defeat, always. But under such auspices is there
Ever a Victory?’ But it is no good,
Indeed it is worthless—thinking on these things.
Merely let us keep our eyes appropriately upwards—
That looks brave—or gaze
At the air embossed with comrades’ songs, or at
Each other’s lips, sharp with the glint of liquor, or observe
The thin mists rising quickly between our fingers.
April, mcmxlii
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