POEMS
Philip Horton
VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY PACELLI
"For you, dear newlyweds, the present hour
Is like a joyful hour in the sowing of a field
Prepared with love." Thus spake according to the press,
The man of God, Representative
Of Christ on Earth, in a purely pastoral discourse.
Richly, as in repletion, his Italian tongue,
Anointed with rationed Spanish oil, continues,
Tolls in his chambered mouth a solemn praise,
Blessing the promised joys of fecundity
And (these agitated times glissando)
"The sublime mission of giving life to innocent
Children, destined to aid their country."
It is not
This music that nioves me, the lyric
round~lay
Of procreation ever returning on itself,
Nor the powered scale of persuasion, practised in all
The chancelleries of Europe; not even the cunning
Of this man's mind, which weighted with present evil
Would yet pursue, fugue-like, its Christian fiction
And so busy our bodies meanwhile with begetting.
Not this, but muted and itself like music,
A counterpoint, miniscular pizzicato
That swarms the inner ear with warning. Listen.
It begins, a papery whisper, wasted suspiration.
It comes from·something like bodies once, and grows
To palsied fiddlings, scraping of bone on bone;
Grows terribly to sight: a procession of moving children,
Pellagric, rickety, crippled with hunger, going
On arms and legs like crutches, their bloated bellies
Carried before like solemn small drums
Strapped on in play, but now grown strangely heavy
And not to be undone; and all of them showing
Pale pigeon-breasts, like fragile prows,
Already pointing deathward.
Not music, no,-
477
