Isaac Rosenburg
Isaac Rosenburg
The plunging limbers over the shattered track |
Racketed with their rusty freight, |
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, |
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old |
To stay the flood of brutish men |
Upon our brothers dear. |
The wheels lurched over sprawled dead |
But pained them not, though their bones crunched, |
Their shut mouths made no moan. |
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, |
Man born of man, and born of women, |
And shells go crying over them |
From night till night and now. |
Earth has waited for them, |
All the time of their growth |
Fretting for their decay: |
Now she has at last! |
In the strength of their strength |
Suspended - stopped and held. |
What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit? |
Earth! have they gone into you! |
Somewhere they must have gone, |
And flung on your hard back |
Is their soul's sack |
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences. |
Who hurled them out? Who hurled? |
None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass, |
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass |
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth, |
When the swift iron burned bee |
Drained the wild honey of their youth. |
What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre, |
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, |
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed, |
Immortal seeming ever? |
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, |
A fear may choke in out veins |
And the startled blood may stop. |
The air is loud with death, |
The dark air spurts with fire, |
The explosions ceaseless are. |
Timelessly now, some minutes past, |
These dead strode time with vigorous life, |
Till the shrapnel called 'An end!' |
But not to all. In bleeding pangs |
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home, |
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts. |
Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel |
Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love, |
The impetuous storm of savage love. |
Dark Earth! Dark Heavens! swinging inchemic smoke |
What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul |
With lightning and thunder from your mimed heart, |
Which man's self dug, and his blind fingers lossed? |
A man's brains splattered on |
A stretcher-bearer's face; |
His shook shoulders slipped their load, |
But when they bent to look again |
The drowning soul was sunk too deep |
For human tenderness. |
They left this dead with the older dead, |
Stretched at the cross roads. |
Burnt black by strange decay |
Their sinister faces lie, |
The lid over each eye, |
The grass and coloured clay |
More motion have than they, |
Joined to the great sunk silences. |
Here is one not long dead; |
His dark hearing caught our far wheels, |
And the choked soul stretched weak hands |
To reach the living word the far wheels said, |
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light, |
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels |
Swift for the end to break |
Or the wheels to break, |
Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight. |
Will they come? Will they ever come? |
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules, |
The quivering-bellied mules, |
And the rushing wheels all mixed |
With his tortured upturned sight. |
So we crashed round the bend, |
We heard his weak scream, |
We heard his very last sound, |
And our wheels grazed his dead face. |
Issac Rosenberg |
Lest we forget
Lest we forget