Memorial Day in Chicago

[mamculuna]

Now The Leaves Are Falling Fast

Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last,
Nurses to their graves are gone,
But the prams go rolling on.

Whispering neighbors left and right
Daunt us from our true delight,
Able hands are left to freeze
Derelict on lonely knees.

Close behind us on our track,
Dead in hundreds cry Alack,
Arms stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.

Scrawny through a plundered wood,
Trolls run scolding for their food,
Owl and nightingale are dumb,
And the angel will not come.

Clear, unscaleable, ahead
Rise the Mountains of Instead.
From whose cold cascading streams
None may drink except in dreams.

- W.H. Auden (1936)

For those who'd like a little more timely poetry:



For the Union Dead
by Robert Lowell

"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."


The old South Boston Aquarium stands

in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.

The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.

The airy tanks are dry.



Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;

my hand tingled

to burst the bubbles

drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.



My hand draws back. I often sigh still

for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom

of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,

I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized



fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,

yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting

as they cropped up tons of mush and grass

to gouge their underworld garage.



Parking spaces luxuriate like civic

sandpiles in the heart of Boston.

A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders

braces the tingling Statehouse,



shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw

and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry

on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,

propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.



Two months after marching through Boston,

half the regiment was dead;

at the dedication,

William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.



Their monument sticks like a fishbone

in the city's throat.

Its Colonel is as lean

as a compass-needle.



He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,

a greyhound's gently tautness;

he seems to wince at pleasure,

and suffocate for privacy.



He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,

peculiar power to choose life and die--

when he leads his black soldiers to death,

he cannot bend his back.



On a thousand small town New England greens,

the old white churches hold their air

of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags

quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.



The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier

grow slimmer and younger each year--

wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets

and muse through their sideburns . . .



Shaw's father wanted no monument

except the ditch,

where his son's body was thrown

and lost with his "niggers."



The ditch is nearer.

There are no statues for the last war here;

on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph

shows Hiroshima boiling



over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"

that survived the blast. Space is nearer.

When I crouch to my television set,

the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.



Colonel Shaw

is riding on his bubble,

he waits

for the blessèd break.



The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,

giant finned cars nose forward like fish;

a savage servility

slides by on grease.


--Robert Lowell



Ode to the Confederate Dead
by Allen Tate

Row after row with strict impunity

The headstones yield their names to the element,

The wind whirrs without recollection;

In the riven troughs the splayed leaves

Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament

To the seasonal eternity of death;

Then driven by the fierce scrutiny

Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,

They sough the rumour of mortality.



Autumn is desolation in the plot

Of a thousand acres where these memories grow

From the inexhaustible bodies that are not

Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.

Think of the autumns that have come and gone!--

Ambitious November with the humors of the year,

With a particular zeal for every slab,

Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot

On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:

The brute curiosity of an angel's stare

Turns you, like them, to stone,

Transforms the heaving air

Till plunged to a heavier world below

You shift your sea-space blindly

Heaving, turning like the blind crab.



Dazed by the wind, only the wind

The leaves flying, plunge



You know who have waited by the wall

The twilight certainty of an animal,

Those midnight restitutions of the blood

You know--the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze

Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,

The cold pool left by the mounting flood,

Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.

You who have waited for the angry resolution

Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,

You know the unimportant shrift of death

And praise the vision

And praise the arrogant circumstance

Of those who fall

Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision--

Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.



Seeing, seeing only the leaves

Flying, plunge and expire



Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,

Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising

Demons out of the earth they will not last.

Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,

Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.

Lost in that orient of the thick and fast

You will curse the setting sun.



Cursing only the leaves crying

Like an old man in a storm



You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point

With troubled fingers to the silence which

Smothers you, a mummy, in time.



The hound bitch

Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar

Hears the wind only.



Now that the salt of their blood

Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,

Seals the malignant purity of the flood,

What shall we who count our days and bow

Our heads with a commemorial woe

In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,

What shall we say of the bones, unclean,

Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?

The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes

Lost in these acres of the insane green?

The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;

In a tangle of willows without light

The singular screech-owl's tight

Invisible lyric seeds the mind

With the furious murmur of their chivalry.



We shall say only the leaves

Flying, plunge and expire



We shall say only the leaves whispering

In the improbable mist of nightfall

That flies on multiple wing:

Night is the beginning and the end

And in between the ends of distraction

Waits mute speculation, the patient curse

That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps

For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.



What shall we say who have knowledge

Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act

To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave

In the house? The ravenous grave?



Leave now

The shut gate and the decomposing wall:

The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,

Riots with his tongue through the hush--

Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!

--Allen Tate

Comments

[himmapaan.livejournal.com]

Thank you for these. :)

I think I like the last stanza of the Allen Tate one best of all...

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

The line from that one that always cycles around in my mind is "What shall we say who have knowledge/ Carried to the heart?"

I'm glad you liked them--I was afraid they wouldn't be interesting to people who had no connection the old conflict (though I think the ideas in the poems are more universal).