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قراءة كتاب Over the Brazier
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اللغة: English
الصفحة رقم: 4
class="verse indent2">I may father no longer!
Here's an end to my art!
I must die and I know it,
With battle murder at my heart—
Sad death for a poet!
THE MORNING BEFORE THE BATTLE
To-day, the fight: my end is very soon,
And sealed the warrant limiting my hours:
I knew it walking yesterday at noon
Down a deserted garden full of flowers.
... Carelessly sang, pinned roses on my breast,
Reached for a cherry-bunch—and then, then, Death
Blew through the garden from the North and East
And blighted every beauty with chill breath.
I looked, and ah, my wraith before me stood,
His head all battered in by violent blows:
The fruit between my lips to clotted blood
Was transubstantiate, and the pale rose
Smelt sickly, till it seemed through a swift tear-flood
That dead men blossomed in the garden-close.
LIMBO
After a week spent under raining skies,
In horror, mud and sleeplessness, a week
Of bursting shells, of blood and hideous cries
And the ever-watchful sniper: where the reek
Of death offends the living ... but poor dead
Can't sleep, must lie awake with the horrid sound
That roars and whirs and rattles overhead
All day, all night, and jars and tears the ground;
When rats run, big as kittens: to and fro
They dart, and scuffle with their horrid fare,
And then one night relief comes, and we go
Miles back into the sunny cornland where
Babies like tickling, and where tall white horses
Draw the plough leisurely in quiet courses.
THE TRENCHES
(Heard in the Ranks)
Scratches in the dirt?
No, that sounds much too nice.
Oh, far too nice.
Seams, rather, of a Greyback Shirt,
And we're the little lice
Wriggling about in them a week or two,
Till one day, suddenly, from the blue
Something bloody and big will come
Like—watch this fingernail and thumb!—
Squash! and he needs no twice.
(Nursery Memories)
I.—THE FIRST FUNERAL
(The first corpse I saw was on the German wires, and couldn't be buried)
The whole field was so smelly;
We smelt the poor dog first:
His horrid swollen belly
Looked just like going burst.
His fur was most untidy;
He hadn't any eyes.
It happened on Good Friday
And there was lots of flies.
And then I felt the coldest
I'd ever felt, and sick,
But Rose, 'cause she's the oldest,
Dared poke him with her stick.
He felt quite soft and horrid:
The flies buzzed round his head
And settled on his forehead:
Rose whispered: "That dog's dead.
"You bury all dead people,
When they're quite really dead,
Round churches with a steeple:
Let's bury this," Rose said.
"And let's put mint all round it
To hide the nasty smell."
I went to look and found it—
Lots, growing near the well.
We poked him through the clover
Into a hole, and then
We threw brown earth right over
And said: "Poor dog, Amen!"
(Nursery Memories)
II.—THE ADVENTURE
(Suggested by the claim of a machine-gun team to have annihilated an enemy wire party: no bodies were found however)
To-day I killed a tiger near my shack
Among the trees: at least, it must have been,
Because his hide was yellow, striped with black,
And his eyes were green.
I crept up close and slung a pointed stone
With all my might: I must have hit his head,
For there he died without a twitch or groan,
And he lay there dead.
I expect that he'd escaped from a Wild Beast Show
By pulling down his cage with an angry tear;
He'd killed and wounded all the people—so
He was hiding there.
I brought my brother up as quick's I could
But there was nothing left when he did come:
The tiger's mate was watching in the wood
And she'd dragged him home.
But, anyhow, I killed him by the shack,
'Cause—listen!—when we hunted in the wood
My brother found my pointed stone all black
With the clotted blood.
(Nursery Memories)
III.—I HATE THE MOON
(After a moonlight patrol near the Brickstacks)
I hate the Moon, though it makes most