505 History and politics poems

These things I do remember; O I pour My soul out for them. All the ages long Hatred pursueth us; through all the years Ignorance like a monster hath devoured Our martyrs as in one long day of blood. Rulers have rise through the endless years, Oppressive, savage in their witless power, Filled with a futile thought: to make an end Of that which God had cherished. There was once A tyrant searching in the Book of God For some word there to serve him as a sword To slay us; and he found the line which spake: “He that doth steal a man and selleth him, He shall be surely put to death.” That king, That dark-designing servant of false gods, Summoned to him ten sages of the Law, Saying: “Pervert the truth not with your lies, But judge this thing: What if a man be found Stealing his brother—one of Israel’s sons— And making merchandise and selling him?” And the ten sages spake: “That thief shall die.” “Your fathers”—said the tyrant, “where are they, That sold their brother to a company Of Ishmaelites? Lo, ye shall now receive Justice of Heaven upon you; for if they, Were now in life, then ye yourselves should judge; But now ye bear on you your fathers’ sin.” “If we have sinned,” they said, “then we shall bear His sentence, Whose compassion fills the world.” “Give us three days,” they spake. And they all looked Unto the High Priest, Rabbi Ishmael, Saying, “Arise, arise, pronounce the Name; Know from our God if this be His decree.” Then Rabbi Ishmael, in purity, Pronounced the Name, and rising up on high, Made question of the angel clothed in white, Who spake: “O righteous! O beloved! I, Hearkening within the secret region, heard That ye indeed be captured.” Thus he spake, And Rabbi Ishmael, descending, told His fellows all their doom. And that dread king Bade the ten sages to be slain in woe And torture. Lo! I saw them all: They stepped out of the ages, and they walked Before the deathless spirit that is mad With hunger for destruction of God’s own. Two of the great in Israel were brought forth To slaughter first:—the High Priest Ishmael, And Rabban Simeon, son of Gamliel, A prince in Israel. And this one implored, “O slay me ere ye slay him, lest I see The death of him who ministers to God!” And lo the lot fell, and they slew him first. And Ishmael raised the severed head and cried— Bitterly loud as calls a trumpet blast:— “How is the tongue that taught the glorious Message Brought low to lick the dust!” And while he wept The tyrant’s daughter stood, and gazing on His beauty, made petition for his life With vain entreaty. Terror makes me dumb To tell the tortures that mine eyes beheld; Only that when the murderous hand had reached His brow, the holy symbol’s seat, he cried With one most bitter cry to his soul’s Lord. Seraphim, in the heights of heaven, called In anguish: “This is then the Law, and this The wage thereof, O Thou who spreadest out Light as a garment! Thus the foe blasphemes Thy great and awful Name, and scorns Thy Law!” But out of Heaven’s height a voice replied: “Let no sound more be uttered, lest I turn The world to water, and My throne’s footstool To sudden chaos. This is My decree; Accept it, all of you who loved the Law Which I created ere the world was made.” Thus were the princes of the Law brought low, The corner-stones jeweled with precepts. Now Rabbi Akiba was led forth to die; Hananya, too, who was Teradyon’s son, Torn from his place; and yet he held the scroll Fast in his arms.—O God, blot out their pain. Mourn, O my people, not yet widowed;—still As in a vision, for a worthless whim I see your holiest slaughtered; see their blood Shed in the Name of Heaven—as even now The blood of Huspith the Interpreter. Trembling takes hold on all who hear, and tears Flow from all eyes, and all delight is dead; For Eliezer falls, Shamua’s son. How have our strong oppressors fed on us! How do they give us water of gall to drink— Slaying Hanina, son of Hakinai! They will not take a ransom, they must take The lives of those who speak the Law’s sweet words, Yea, even now the Scribe Yeshebab’s life. Sons of unrerason strike us with their fear More than the kings of earth; they slay of us Many and many; verily they cast Judah, the son of Dama, unto death! Ah, Thou has said, Jacob shall be a fire, Joseph a flame—lo, the last ashes die. O bring the burning of the day of doom, For Judah, son of Baba, is not spared. Here were ten righteous men; lo, they are slain. This hath befallen us. All this I tell As I beheld it passing through the years Of bygone ages. And subdued and crushed, We pour our hearts out supplicating Thee. Lord, Lord, give ear; O pitying, merciful, Look from Thine height upon the blood outpoured Of all Thy righteous. Make an end of blood Poured out and wasted; wash the stain away, God, King, who sittest on a gracious Throne.

To the Lord General Cromwell, May 1652, On the proposals of certain ministers at the Committee for Propagation of the Gospel Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud Not of war only, but detractions rude, Guided by faith and matchless fortitude, To peace and truth thy glorious way hast plough'd, And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud Hast rear'd God's trophies, and his work pursu'd, While Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbru'd, And Dunbar field, resounds thy praises loud, And Worcester's laureate wreath; yet much remains To conquer still: peace hath her victories No less renown'd than war. New foes arise Threat'ning to bind our souls with secular chains: Help us to save free Conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.

Cyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench Of British Themis, with no mean applause, Pronounced, and in his volumes taught, our laws, Which others at their bar so often wrench, Today deep thoughts resolve with me to drench In mirth that after no repenting draws; Let Euclid rest, and Archimedes pause, And what the Swede intend, and what the French. To measure life learn thou betimes, and know Toward solid good what leads the nearest way; For other things mild Heaven a time ordains, And disapproves that care, though wise in show, That with superfluous burden loads the day, And, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.

Puerto Rico was created when the pumpkin on top of The turtle burst and its teeming waters poured out With all mankind and beastkind riding on the waves Until the water drained leaving a tropical paradise. Puerto Rico was stumbled on by lost vampires bearing Crucifix in one hand, arquebus in the other, sucking The veins of land and men, tossing the pulp into the Compost heap which they used as the foundation for Their fortifications and other vainglorious temples. Puerto Rico was arrested just as it broke out of the Spanish jail and, renamed a trusty, it was put in an American cell. When the prisoner hollered, "Yankee, Go Home," Puerto Rico was referred to the United Nations. Puerto Rico, to get to paradise now, you have to ride blood.

My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf, mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know me. Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and the spring growth of wild onion. I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam-heated flats with the music of El and subway in my ears, walled in by steel and wood and brick far from the sky. I want the cotton fields, tabacco and the cane. I want to walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground. Restless music is in my heart and I am eager to be gone. O Southland, sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and blood! How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and the chain gangs keep me from my own?

Torquemada. Now that Castile and Aragon in holy wedlock are Spain, and the last city of the Moors in Spain is Spanish except for Moor and Jew— about every crucifix in every market-place and in the court itself the Jews!— as seven centuries of Christian valor, Christian piety triumph stay not your hand; Spain of the knights, one in fealty to your majesties, become one in faith, Spain of the saints! Like the sun, rising as our Savior from His tomb into the brilliant sky blaze until the clouds that still obscure the light are drawn into His brightness and earth is brilliant as the sky is bright. Spain newly united still divided— as the season of cold is the season of darkness in the spring of our rejoicing that the Moor is gone from Spain, the Jew go too! But if the Spaniard speaks, I speak no less a Christian: throw away the curse, you Jews, of fifteen hundred years; stay and prosper and Church and Heaven prosper, in our nets a goodly catch. Think not that we want aught of you but your souls; your money and your jewels— all your trash— keep if you stay and are Christian, take if you are Jews and go; we ask of you nothing but your Judaism which has brought you so much misery and will bring each of you— the youngest and the gentlest— to the flames of Hell and the worm that dies not. We give you, miserable sinners, the waters of Paradise; we give you the blessings of the saints, the blessings of Mary, the blessed mother of Christ, and the blessings of our Lord Jesus. Isabella. There is a sweet reasonableness in the words of our prior; it is Saint Dominic who speaks to us through his Dominican or Saint James himself. Abrabanel. No noble in your court, your majesties, proud of his forefather, conquering Goth or Visigoth or Vandal, is of an older Spanish line than we— Jews in Iberia before the Romans came. No noble boasting his service boasts of more than that Jew who through a thousand shoals and reefs piloted Aragon to Castile—your marriage and Spain’s glory. The rest of us, many tens of thousands, serve you humbly in smithy, field or vineyard, soldiers or physicians, as we have served in Spain two thousand years, Spaniards, true to your majesties as we are to the God of Israel—and of Spain, unlike the others only in our faith for which, if we must answer, we shall answer to our God. Torquemada. Since all we do, and each word spoken, if only in our hearts, must be in worship— not a leaf falls slowly but in His service— to be unlike us in our faith is to be unlike in everything. True, you Jews must answer to your God, and in the flames and burning ice of Hell forever you shall answer; but we too, priests, bishops, queen and king, must answer for you: farmer or captain answers; shall we be less answerable for souls? Abrabanel. You do not honor your God by bringing Him captives, like a mere emperor who must have retainers and retinue, serfs and forced labor; the loadstone without visible motion draws to itself every particle of iron; the sword—even though a winged angel swings it— served only to drive Adam from his paradise. Your fingers stiff with rings and jewels, you dishonor your faith, your majesties, by cruelty, give it whatever noble name you will as princes make a rogue knight or lord. Will thieves and pirates be gentler with us than your constables and soldiers?— your majesties will hear of many ripped up for the jewels it will be said they swallowed; many left by sailors to die on reefs and sandbars for a smock or a pair of hose; many dead of plague or found like birds in winter dead in the fields about towns or like fish upon a beach; many will die as slaves at work beasts would be fitter for but costlier, who have written a page of Castilian or handled a Toledo blade with the best. And yet the weak has each his strength, Spain of Spaniard, Basque, and Catalonian, Moor and Gypsy, else all beasts were tigers, all fish sharks, and only giants left; the stricken remember— as wounds and scars last longer than the blow— and if drops of water wear channels in the rock on which the earth itself is, in the action of centuries how powerful are tears. Would you have our religion like our clothes—for comfort and the eyes of men, put off at night, and we left lying naked in the darkness? The body is like roots stretching down into the earth— forcing still a way over stones and under rock, through sand, sucking nourishment in darkness, bearing the tread of man and beast, and of the earth forever; but the spirit— twigs and leaves spreading through sunshine or the luminous darkness of twilight, evening, night, and dawn, moving in every wind of heaven and turning to whatever corner of the sky is brightest, compelled by nothing stronger than the light; the body is like earth, the spirit like water without which earth is sand and which must be free or stagnant; or if the body is as water, the spirit is like air that must have doors and windows or else is stuffy and unbreathable— or like the fire of which sun and stars have been compounded, which Joshua could command but for an hour. Isabella. If our eye offends us, pluck it out! Even so, we will sweep away the Jews from every town and hamlet, field and corner of our dominion, though they are the sands for number. Go and begone—but stay as Christians; come and be dear to us, as the Prodigal! Abrabanel. We Jews have been accused of love of wealth, but not for all our wealth in Spain, fields and vineyards, houses of timber and houses of stone that we must leave, and all the wealth that will be stolen from us, will we stay; we Jews have been accused of arrogance, but not for all the dignities that we must leave, our offices and honors in this, the proudest court of Christendom, will we stay; we Jews have been accused of love of life, delighting in the flesh, but though we shall die along a thousand roads we will not stay— striking roots somewhere to flourish as we flourished, giving shade and fruit.

(from Julius Caesar , spoken by Marc Antony) Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it. Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest– For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men– Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man. He hath brought many captives home to Rome Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill: Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man. You all did see that on the Lupercal I thrice presented him a kingly crown, Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition? Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And, sure, he is an honourable man. I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke, But here I am to speak what I do know. You all did love him once, not without cause: What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him? O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason. Bear with me; My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me.

(from Richard III , spoken by Gloucester) Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths; Our bruised arms hung up for monuments; Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front; And now, instead of mounting barded steeds To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them; Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity: And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days. Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams, To set my brother Clarence and the king In deadly hate the one against the other: And if King Edward be as true and just As I am subtle, false and treacherous, This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up, About a prophecy, which says that 'G' Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be. Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes.

According to local belief, Squaw Island—which is situated in the midst of the Niagara River near Buffalo, New York—was home for a band of prostitutes who serviced workers from the Erie Canal, circa 1840. Today, Squaw Island is a municipal refuse dump for the city of Buffalo. 1 Slime burlap on timbers riverside, yea More captive berths to consider: boundaries Set by familar propositions Of comfort and flatbottom mud. We men Haul up some miracle of a ditch To what’s called Squaw Island. And such remains the canalman’s trade At last. Harsh ways, we tell you, Woman, your eyes and rapture averted To the long boats pulled in tandem To your door. How could we see then How it was always us alone— Unknown stations in need of poor launch? 2 If they could sing or even listen A little, we’d be lost deep in the pitch And rumble of real lives, primed To unload a pledge or two of return. One day, under the shadow of hawks, We locked in the long grass As if slugs. The aftermath was quick Parting, forever maybe, then back To our stories of the packet boat Whacking through tangle reeds And the stoop-backed Irish turning mythic In this, a speechless country, Almost mysterious as perfume itself. 3 Captivated at Little Falls, gone clean By Weedsport, pressing toward Those vainglorious times up in Lowertown Where we’d stroll the day, liquor In hand, waiting a turn at the Locks. It should be allowed as how girls Were not forgotten, either. Sure In any faint light setting off-island, You see the hair’s worn from their legs By woolen trousers. Odd why Such standard gossip keeps us Huddled around cigar smoke and fun, Ever shuffling, ready again to move soon. 4 After miles of stumps and clear-cut skies, More stumps. And the deadly matter Of building country in the calm of summer Burdens like a search for much worse. Thinking through a warm afternoon rain, Thinking of getting there, downwater Toward neglect for glory’s sake And other never-lasting bounty, A blessing, it seems, becomes this— All passages so unworldly hot As to be bitter, our own massive bones Sweating. O Motherly touch and need, What have we to do with thee? 5 Just nervous, and the skirtless brides Seem just the same. At the taking Of shore, there’s care for the prize Portraiture of a girl at sixteen in your vest, Driving you mad, and on. It’s a gravity In the blood, unchangeable as the waif You are, a dwarf among dwarfs, no force. They tell you they understand. So half The time so drunk as to see, you wear Your life like a bandanna. That’s all Nobody’s business. That’s all the secret There is. But to any woman’s edges, Rubbed soft as landscape, you are less. 6 Kissing that last sure drop of sweat From a heavy lip, tongues wag easy In this good composted land Amid mire and flesh, a threat of snow. We rise from a hut born To game and holiday, knowing barely Ourselves. None of us escape The terrible progress we make Suffering yet another pleasure. Sad, say, the ways we loved like stones— No courting dance, no feathers Or gesture. But then nobody asked For more than favors or strange luck. 7 They watch for clouds. Any muster Could ruin business, however damp Already the shining caves that bristle Like pearl in moonlight. Beneath their belts The sources of circumstance and invention Turn nightfall to a wash. Lacking A westerly push toward Erie, the hide Tingles for a pressure, a sign, If only the whine of a full day’s water Lost to Niagara. In fair time, The swell might thicken and warm As soup in the casual hands Of a visitor aging to unwelcome weathers. 8 So it’s Buffalo: gutspill and sideshow, Crusade of rascals swaggering Up Front Street. Lovey, it all passes forth— The heart’s infirmities, our grinding Labors .... Who hasn’t spent a life Making civilization right and not Gone wrong? Soon there’ll be other empires, Then farther west, further refinements Of the breed. We conclude here, A rainy frontier, end of a pity. What’s more? Ah, dreaming, we’d scheme of strangers Above our sorry place, wise builders erecting Able love some hundred years hence! 9 Like a hatch of horseflies streaming Into gray light, we’ve grown free to cross The flushing river on abundant piping Of sludge. Where’s the barrelhouse, The waste of laughter and bile that releases? Instead there’s a world piled on bedrock, A history failing its horizons, Properties of muck increased by modern Wealth. We’re where the lost bodies Of unshared spheres intertwine As a distant rescue from style and form, From tales left squalid in the telling: Now just a vigilance, faith’s fallen banner ....

A recent piece in PRAVDA gives the library books checked out by Stalin between April and December, 1926. Much has been made of their oddity... Robert Conquest I THE ESSENCE OF HYPNOSIS (Paris: LeGrande, 1902)