POEMS
What he remembered from his childhood, Peace:
The marks papering a wall, the hungry weeping,
The machine-guns pulsing in the workers' streets.
Numb, filthy, shivering, he sees again
The stars dim behind the eternal lights of man
And sobs.
It
is, as it has been, the joy of men
To escaoe from another's evil to their own.
!Iere, so like, sc different, is all that you had planned.
Think, as you tremble in the new world's air,
That more than seas, than continents, the years
Lie absolute between you and those wars
You wished, worked out, and thought at last were yours.
Here, here around you are your colonies;
Here in the midnight of the alien wilderness
The mastering races forge their destiny and yours.
Teach me the meaning of my world too well
For you or it to be endurable to me;
Last, till the states, the years, end here with you
To cough their blood out on the neutral earth.
Die, soldier, while the guns learn everything
From your thin body pinned against the light.
PRISONERS
vVithin the wires of the post, unloading the cans of garbage,
The three in soiled blue denim (the white ball on their backs
Sending its chilly
North
six yards to the turning blackened
Sights of the cradled rifle, to the eyes of the yawning guard)
Go on all day being punished, go on all month, all year
Loading, unloading; give their child's, beast's sigh - of despair,
Of endurance and of existence; look unexpectingly
433
At the big guard, dark in his khaki, at the dust of the blazing plain,
At the running or crawling soldiers in their soiled and shapeless green.
The prisoners, the guard, the soldiers- they are all, in their way,
being trained.
From these moments, repeated forever, our own new world will be
made.
