and in your spite and against your wish you'll bring their strange incense
like the tender spring to your heart-and it will not be loathsome to it;
and with a multitude of golden arrows the sun will pierce your liver
and seven rays from every grain of glass will dance in your torture.
For the Lord called the Spring and the slaughterer together:
the sun rose, rye bloomed and the slaughterer slaughtered.
And you'll flee and come to a yard, and this yard will have a heap in it–
and on this heap they'll have beheaded two-a Jew and his dog.
One axe did for them both and in one heap they were thrown
and in the mixed blood of both-pigs will snuffie and roll;
tomorrow a rain will come down, and sweep it to one of the
wasteland streams
and blood will no longer scream from the gutters and from the garbage pails
for it will be lost in the deep or water and feed the thorns-
and all will be as nothing, all go back to as if it never were.
And to the attics of the roofS you'll climb and stand there in the darkness
while bitter fear of death still gnaws in lightless quiet;
and from all the dark holes and from the shadows
in
vents
eyes, see them, eyes silently watch.
Ghosts of the "martyred" they are, bent and desolate
to one corner under a roof they are crammed-and they keep silent...
Here the axe found them and to this place they come
to stamp here the look of their eyes in that last moment,
all the sorrow of their pointless death and all the curse of their lives
and they cling here together, trembling and terrified, and from where
they hide
silently raise their eyes to protest their disgrace and ask: why?
And who else is like God on earth and can bear this in silence?
And you raise your eyes to the roof, and its eaves too keep quiet–
they're darkening over you and keeping mum, and you ask the spiders:
they are living witness, on the scene, they'll tell you all the facts:
the case of a disembowelled chest filled with feathers,
the case of nostrils and nine inch nails and skulls and hammers,
the case of slaughtered human beings hung up from beams like fish
and the case of a baby found by the side of his stabbed mother
still dozing with her cold nipple in his sucking mouth;
and the case of a child who was quartered and gave up the ghost
with the word "Mamma!"-
and his eyes too are here, calling me to account.
And more like these and of these the spider tells
things that poke holes in the brain and are enough to kill
your spirit and your soul to an eternal death-
