505 History and politics poems

Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero! How just and true that this great nation, being conceived In liberty by fugitives should find —Strange ways and plays of monstrous History— This Hamlet-type to be the President— This failure, this unwilling bridegroom, This tricky lawyer full of black despair— He grew a beard, becoming President, And took a shawl as if he guessed his role, Though with the beard he fled cartoonists’ blacks, And many laughed and were contemptuous, And some for four years spoke of killing him— He was a politician—of the heart!— He lived from hand to mouth in moral things! He understood quite well Grant’s drunkenness! It was for him, before Election Day, That at Cold Harbor Grant threw lives away In hopeless frontal attack against Lee’s breastworks! O how he was the Hamlet-man, and this, After a life of failure made him right, After he ran away on his wedding day, Writing a coward’s letter to his bride— How with his very failure, he out-tricked The florid Douglas and the abstract Davis, And all the vain men who, surrounding him, Smiled in their vanity and sought his place— Later, they made him out a prairie Christ To sate the need coarse in the national heart— His wife went insane, Mary Todd too often Bought herself dresses. And his child died. And he would not condemn young men to death For having slept, in weakness. And he spoke More than he knew and all that he had felt Between outrageous joy and black despair Before and after Gettysburg’s pure peak— He studied law, but knew in his own soul Despair’s anarchy, terror and error, —Instruments had to be taken from his office And from his bedroom in such days of horror, Because some saw that he might kill himself: When he was young, when he was middle-aged, How just and true was he, our national hero! Sometimes he could not go home to face his wife, Sometimes he wished to hurry or end his life! But do not be deceived. He did not win, And, it is plain, the South could never win (Despite the gifted Northern generals!) —Capitalismus is not mocked, O no! This stupid deity decided the War— In fact, the North and South were losers both: —Capitalismus won the Civil War— —Capitalismus won the Civil War, Yet, in the War’s cruel Colosseum, Some characters fulfilled their natures’ surds, Grant the drunkard, Lee the noble soldier, John Brown in whom the Bible soared and cried, Booth the unsuccessful Shakespearean, —Each in some freedom walked and knew himself, Then most of all when all the deities Mixed with their barbarous stupidity To make the rock, root, and rot of the war— “This is the way each only life becomes, Tossed on History’s ceaseless insane sums!”

To-day, O martyred chief, beneath the sun We would unveil thy form; to thee who won Th’applause of nations for thy soul sincere, A loving tribute we would offer here. ’T was thine not worlds to conquer, but men’s hearts; To change to balm the sting of slavery’s darts; In lowly charity thy joy to find, And open “gates of mercy on mankind.” And so they come, the freed, with grateful gift, From whose sad path the shadows thou didst lift. Eleven years have rolled their seasons round, Since its most tragic close thy life-work found. Yet through the vistas of the vanished days We see thee still, responsive to our gaze, As ever to thy country’s solemn needs. Not regal coronets, but princely deeds Were thy chaste diadem; of truer worth Thy modest virtues than the gems of earth. Stanch, honest, fervent in the purest cause, Truth was thy guide; her mandates were thy laws. Rare heroism, spirit-purity, The storied Spartan’s stern simplicity, Such moral strength as gleams like burnished gold Amid the doubt of men of weaker mould, Were thine. Called in thy country’s sorest hour, When brother knew not brother—mad for power— To guide the helm through bloody deeps of war, While distant nations gazed in anxious awe, Unflinching in the task, thou didst fulfill Thy mighty mission with a deathless will. Born to a destiny the most sublime, Thou wert, O Lincoln! in the march of time, God bade thee pause and bid the oppressed go free— Most glorious boon giv’n to humanity. While slavery ruled the land, what deeds were done? What tragedies enacted ’neath the sun! Her page is blurred with records of defeat, Of lives heroic lived in silence, meet For the world’s praise; of woe, despair and tears, The speechless agony of weary years. Thou utteredst the word, and Freedom fair Rang her sweet bells on the clear winter air; She waved her magic wand, and lo! from far A long procession came. With many a scar Their brows were wrinkled, in the bitter strife, Full many had said their sad farewell to life But on they hastened, free, their shackles gone; The aged, young,—e’en infancy was borne To offer unto thee loud paeans of praise,— Their happy tribute after saddest days. A race set free! The deed brought joy and light! It bade calm Justice from her sacred height, When faith and hope and courage slowly waned, Unfurl the stars and stripes, at last unstained! The nations rolled acclaim from sea to sea, And Heaven’s vault rang with Freedom’s harmony. The angels ’mid the amaranths must have hushed Their chanted cadences, as upward rushed The hymn sublime: and as the echoes pealed, God’s ceaseless benison the action sealed. As now we dedicate this shaft to thee, True champion! in all humility And solemn earnestness, we would erect A monument invisible, undecked, Save by our allied purpose to be true To Freedom’s loftiest precepts, so that through The fiercest contests we may walk secure, Fixed on foundations that may still endure, When granite shall have crumbled to decay, And generations passed from earth away. Exalted patriot! illustrious chief! Thy life’s immortal work compels belief. To-day in radiance thy virtues shine, And how can we a fitting garland twine? Thy crown most glorious to a ransomed race! High on our country’s scroll we fondly trace, In lines of fadeless light that softly blend, Emancipator, hero, martyr, friend! While Freedom may her holy sceptre claim, The world shall echo with Our Lincoln’s name.

He is gone, the strong base of the nation, The dove to his covet has fled; Ye heroes lament his privation, For Lincoln is dead. He is gone down, the sun of the Union, Like Phoebus, that sets in the west; The planet of peace and communion, Forever has gone to his rest. He is gone down from a world of commotion, No equal succeeds in his stead; His wonders extend with the ocean, Whose waves murmur, Lincoln is dead. He is gone and can ne’er be forgotten, Whose great deeds eternal shall bloom; When gold, pearls and diamonds are rotten, His deeds will break forth from the tomb. He is gone out of glory to glory, A smile with the tear may be shed, O, then let us tell the sweet story, Triumphantly, Lincoln is dead.

When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour Greatening and darkening as it hurried on, She left the Heaven of Heroes and came down To make a man to meet the mortal need. She took the tried clay of the common road— Clay warm yet with the genial heat of Earth, Dashed through it all a strain of prophecy; Tempered the heap with thrill of human tears; Then mixed a laughter with the serious stuff. Into the shape she breathed a flame to light That tender, tragic, ever-changing face. Here was a man to hold against the world, A man to match the mountains and the sea. The color of the ground was in him, the red earth; The smack and tang of elemental things; The rectitude and patience of the cliff; The good-will of the rain that loves all leaves; The friendly welcome of the wayside well; The courage of the bird that dares the sea; The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn; The pity of the snow that hides all scars; The secrecy of streams that make their way Beneath the mountain to the rifted rock; The tolerance and equity of light That gives as freely to the shrinking flower As to the great oak flaring to the wind— To the grave’s low hill as to the Matterhorn That shoulders out the sky. Sprung from the West, He drank the valorous youth of a new world. The strength of virgin forests braced his mind, The hush of spacious prairies stilled his soul. His words were oaks in acorns; and his thoughts Were roots that firmly gripped the granite truth. Up from log cabin to the Capitol, One fire was on his spirit, one resolve— To send the keen ax to the root of wrong, Clearing a free way for the feet of God, The eyes of conscience testing every stroke, To make his deed the measure of a man. He built the rail-pile as he built the State, Pouring his splendid strength through every blow: The grip that swung the ax in Illinois Was on the pen that set a people free. So came the Captain with the mighty heart; And when the judgment thunders split the house, Wrenching the rafters from their ancient rest, He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again The rafters of the Home.   He held his place— Held the long purpose like a growing tree— Held on through blame and faltered not at praise. And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs, Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

A courtier speaks to Ch’in Shih-huang-ti, ca. 210 B.C. Highness, the former walls were helpless. They stood alone in the middle of small fields protecting nothing. A single peasant’s holding engulfed each one as it ran briefly, straight from noplace off to noplace, with ruinous steps of broken stone at both ends. Only head-high, without the towers, gates and towns of your great wall, they stuck where they were, never rising over hills or curving through valleys: nothing but shoddy masonry and a mystery: who built them, how long ago, what for? They seemed to have no role but balking the reaper and the ox; their bases made islands in the flashing scythe-strokes, where wild flowers and shrubs sprouted. So all the people praise you for burying such walls and their memory in your vast one, which joins them, stretching far beyond where they once crumbled to hold your Empire: a wall which therefore can never have an end but has to go on extending itself forever. How useful, how cogent your wall is: a pale for the civilized, a dike against the wild people outside, who trade their quiet human blood for the rage of gods, tearing men to pieces, throwing them, watching them fall. In burying those little walls, Lord, you have covered our shame at our ancestors, best forgotten, whose mighty works were so pointless, or so pitiably useless. Was all their effort so that daisies could grow in fissures? So that some human work would rise over the flats and weather till it seemed not human? Only so that something of ours could be like trees and rocks: docile-seeming, yet sullenly opposed to use, and when compelled, only half serving, reserving from the functions that we give them a secret and idle self. The peasants would make lean-tos for cattle against those walls: they served for this alone. Now scholars, Lord, are saying the gods are not bulls and cows. That in ancient times we herded these animals to keep from starving and going naked, and so came the old custom of thinking them gods—from dependence. In my youth, I know, the peasants said just the opposite. Worship came first. The awesome bull and cow were gathered to be adored more easily, till people noticed how they let themselves be driven and penned. Next came the first murders against these gods, and the careful observation that they stood to be killed. And so their cult became contempt of beings that would live with us and submit to our crimes and hunger, and we began to breed them. That is why, the farmer says, cattle are honoured, murdered, eaten, cherished with labour that makes him their slave, and that is why in summer he exults in blood, but shivers with fear, with exhausted terror and regret, and sinks into stunned revelry all winter, eating the salted meat, getting children, his house closed up with snow, himself awake as if he slept, living as if he had already died, and rich, happy as if he were a buried worm. Is God, then, Highness, the fat flaccidity of cattle? Myself, I don’t like to wonder anymore. I only hope lifelong service earns what I ask: the command of some far bastion on your wall where it curves out into the unsettled wastes beyond any field, and the barrenness inside is indistinguishable from that without. This is the reward and end of life I want: to be a point, though infinitely small and far from you, in that wide circle centred on your great self. I see myself arriving to take charge of my troops. I look down from the tower: bare plains, outcrops of ice and rock, vast restless stirrings of grey grasses and dark-veined overcast, the cold wind’s hissing. Year after year the same, waiting for an assault that never comes, straining to glimpse our naked enemies creeping blended with their stony soil: nothing but legend, it may be. Maybe a morning will rise when, waking, I find that I’ve forgotten which way is north, and can’t tell if I am turned outward to danger or inward, Highness, to you. The sun invisible, a murky light diffused throughout featureless cloud, and the wall so long no curve appears—it seems to stretch out straight endlessly east and west: what clue will there be which way to face my people for the attack? It will be crucial then to show no doubt. My orders, I vow, though ignorant, will be crisp.

The Due D’Aumal’s cannonballs Are being marshmellowed 370 years from their masonic inception Now lie on the Potomac The Due D’Aumal’s balls cannonaded Split Through mirror teeth Washington D.C. Black City of white rectangular bits of fear Blown fluff of fear O the Duke of Aumal’s balls are raging Yellow vermin white houses of fear And beautiful funky people Diamond heart D’Afrique Human blood human need Black booming emotional vibes of life White geometry of abstract cerebral death I really saw at Fort McNair In front of American General’s mansion A fir-tree tied down to a black coffiny box Jefferson’s phantom always rides tonight There’s a solar splendor burst from Eighteenth-Century Cannon of the Due D’Aumal I’m sure Citizen Lafayette was no dixiecrat

(We can succeed only by concert. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves. . . . December 1, 1862. The President’s Message to Congress.) Be sad, be cool, be kind, remembering those now dreamdust hallowed in the ruts and gullies, solemn bones under the smooth blue sea, faces warblown in a falling rain. Be a brother, if so can be, to those beyond battle fatigue each in his own corner of earth or forty fathoms undersea beyond all boom of guns, beyond any bong of a great bell, each with a bosom and number, each with a pack of secrets, each with a personal dream and doorway and over them now the long endless winds with the low healing song of time, the hush and sleep murmur of time. Make your wit a guard and cover. Sing low, sing high, sing wide. Let your laughter come free remembering looking toward peace: “We must disenthrall ourselves.” Be a brother, if so can be, to those thrown forward for taking hardwon lines, for holding hardwon points and their reward so-so, little they care to talk about, their pay held in a mute calm, highspot memories going unspoken, what they did being past words, what they took being hardwon. Be sad, be kind, be cool. Weep if you must And weep open and shameless before these altars. There are wounds past words. There are cripples less broken than many who walk whole. There are dead youths with wrists of silence who keep a vast music under their shut lips, what they did being past words, their dreams like their deaths beyond any smooth and easy telling, having given till no more to give. There is dust alive with dreams of The Republic, with dreams of the Family of Man flung wide on a shrinking globe with old timetables, old maps, old guide-posts torn into shreds, shot into tatters burnt in a firewind, lost in the shambles, faded in rubble and ashes. There is dust alive. Out of a granite tomb, Out of a bronze sarcophagus, Loose from the stone and copper Steps a whitesmoke ghost Lifting an authoritative hand In the name of dreams worth dying for, In the name of men whose dust breathes of those dreams so worth dying for, what they did being past words, beyond all smooth and easy telling. Be sad, be kind, be cool, remembering, under God, a dreamdust hallowed in the ruts and gullies, solemn bones under the smooth blue sea, faces warblown in a falling rain. Sing low, sing high, sing wide. Make your wit a guard and cover. Let your laughter come free like a help and a brace of comfort. The earth laughs, the sun laughs over every wise harvest of man, over man looking toward peace by the light of the hard old teaching: “We must disenthrall ourselves.”

I. Five soldiers fixed by Mathew Brady’s eye Stand in a land subdued beyond belief. Belief might lend them life again. I try Like orphaned Hamlet working up his grief To see my spellbound fathers in these men Who, breathless in their amber atmosphere, Show but the postures men affected then And the hermit faces of a finished year. The guns and gear and all are strange until Beyond the tents I glimpse a file of trees Verging a road that struggles up a hill. They’re sycamores. The long-abated breeze Flares in those boughs I know, and hauls the sound Of guns and a great forest in distress. Fathers, I know my cause, and we are bound Beyond that hill to fight at Wilderness. II. But trick your eyes with Birnam Wood, or think How fire-cast shadows of the bankside trees Rode on the back of Simois to sink In the wide waters. Reflect how history’s Changes are like the sea’s, which mauls and mulls Its salvage of the world in shifty waves, Shrouding in evergreen the oldest hulls And yielding views of its confounded graves To the new moon, the sun, or any eye That in its shallow shoreward version sees The pebbles charging with a deathless cry And carageen memorials of trees. III. Now, old man of the sea, I start to understand: The will will find no stillness Back in a stilled land. The dead give no command And shall not find their voice Till they be mustered by Some present fatal choice. Let me now rejoice In all impostures, take The shape of lion or leopard, Boar, or watery snake, Or like the comber break, Yet in the end stand fast And by some fervent fraud Father the waiting past, Resembling at the last The self-established tree That draws all waters toward Its live formality.

Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a riband to stick in his coat— Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, Lost all the others she lets us devote; They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, So much was theirs who so little allowed: How all our copper had gone for his service! Rags—were they purple, his heart had been proud! We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him, Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, Learned his great language, caught his clear accents, Made him our pattern to live and to die! Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us, Burns, Shelley, were with us,—they watch from their graves! He alone breaks from the van and the freemen, —He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves! We shall march prospering,—not thro' his presence; Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre; Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence, Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels, One wrong more to man, one more insult to God! Life's night begins: let him never come back to us! There would be doubt, hesitation and pain, Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight, Never glad confident morning again! Best fight on well, for we taught him—strike gallantly, Menace our heart ere we master his own; Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us, Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!

The heart dies without space for love, without a moral horizon: think of it then as a bird trapped in a box. My heart goes out with love to those beyond the fence; only toward them can one really advance, that is, make progress. Without them I feel I’m half a person. Romeo was born a Montague, and Juliet came from the Capulet line, and I’m a disciple of Shakespeare, not Ben Gurion— therefore I’ll be delighted if my daughter marries the grandson of Haidar Abdel Shafi. I mean this, of course, as a parable only—but the parable is my measure, and since it has more to do with my body than teeth or hair, this isn’t just some idle fancy that, out of poetic license, I place our fate in my daughter’s sex. That I grant myself this imaginary gift, testifies to the extent to which we’re living, still, in the underworld, where we’re granted the hope and potential of an amoeba. But all mythology begins with creatures that creep and crawl, spring out of the ground and devour each other, until a sacred union occurs, healing the breach in the world. The Arab groom from Gaza, too, will extend to my daughter a dress on which is embroidered the Land redeemed from Apartheid’s curse— our Land as a whole, belonging equally to all of its offspring, and then he’ll lift the veil from her face, and say to her: “And now I take you to be my wife, Lotem Abdel Shafi.”