POEMS
Old Man
When we come upon men crucified,
Or women hanging downward from the trees
They no longer understand.
Woman
How merciful
is
memory with its fantasies.
They are getting the refugee habit.. . .
Old Man
How weary are the roads of the blood.
Walking forwards towards death in my mind
I am walking backwards again into my youth;
A mother, a father, and a house,
One street, a certain town, a particular place:
And the feeling of belonging somewhere,
Of being appropriate to certain fields and trees.
Woman
Now our address
is
the world. Walls
Constrain us. 0 do you remember
The peninsula where we so nearly died,
And the way the trees looked owned,
Human and domestic like a group of horses?
They said
it
was Greece.
Man
Through Prussia into Russia,
Through Holland into Poland,
Through Rumania into Albania.
Woman
Following the rotation of the seasons.
Old Man
We are getting the refugee habit:
The past and the future are not enough,
Are two walls only between which to die:
Who can live in a house with two walls?
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